With just two tables of players left in the PokerStars Festival Atlantic City Main Event in November, Wayne Gerichten was laughing, joking and having the time of his life. Having won his way into the $1,100 buy-in event on a freeroll on PokerStarsNJ.com, Gerichten was a little bit more relaxed than some of the others.

Just two years earlier he was diagnosed with liver disease and was told it was pretty far advanced. The 63-year-old has endured radiation treatments – more than 100 of them – and was left unable to continue working as a painter in South New Jersey, something he’d done for 20 years. Gerichten turned to online poker.

“I got into it mainly because when they diagnosed me two years ago I thought ‘Oh my god, I don’t have any more to leave my son’. I don’t want to leave him broke, I want him to have some funds here,” said Gerichten. “I play every day. I don’t work very much anymore. I had undergone a lot of radiation treatment for liver disease and it fatigued me so much that I wasn’t able to work too much so I was sitting home and I figured what better way to make some extra money than playing online?”

Gerichten focuses almost all of his time on playing smaller buy-in online tournaments, including the freeroll that got him into the Festival event in Atlantic City.

“I don’t play a whole lot of live tournaments, but I had qualified for the Festival in Resorts in Atlantic City. I went down to that and I thought that was the highlight of my career, playing with some of the pros like Chris Moneymaker, Jason Mercier, Vanessa Selbst,” said Gerichten. “I went down there thinking I was only going to be there one day, booked a room for one night and ended up staying for five days.”

Over the course of those five days, Gerichten outlasted 190 other before eventually busting in 18th place and walking away with $2,331. Each day his son, Wayne Jr., took an hour-long bus ride each way back and forth to Toms River, NJ so he could work at the pool hall he runs but be there to sweat his dad. One night they stayed up late scouting one of his opponents.

“We saw the list the night before of where I was going to be sitting the next day and saw that Barry Greenstein was going to be at my table and I thought ‘oh boy here we go’. We sat up for five hours watching videos of Barry,” said Gerichten. ” I said ‘I want to see his style of play’. I’ve watched him many times on TV but never that close and I wanted to see his strategy, how he played, so we sat up until 5 o’clock in the morning watching videos of Barry Greenstein.”

The research paid off as Gerichten was the one to actually eliminate Greenstein from the tournament when his pocket kings held up against Greenstein’s pocket tens in an all in preflop confrontation. It just so happens that Greenstein is one of Gerichten’s favorite players and having the chance to play with him gave him an up-close look at what makes him successful.

“He’s such a great guy, he’s so quiet. I love his style of play. He’s quiet but aggressive, he knows when to make the moves,” said Gerichten. “It was great playing with him, it was exciting for me I wasn’t nervous in the least.”

Gerichten is going to have another shot at Greenstein, and maybe up to 1,000 other players, starting January 8 when he takes his seat in the PokerStars Live Championship Bahamas Main Event. And once again, Gerichten really has nothing to lose after winning his way into the $5,300 buy-in event on a PokerStarsNJ.com freeroll in November.

“It was a freeroll with 518 players and you had to be first – second place got $100, first place got the $11,000 package,” said Gerichten of the freeroll that happened just a few days after he got back to his Toms River house after wrapping up his PokerStars Live Festival run. “Scared money doesn’t win. It’s only first place – I didn’t want to take second place. I haven’t had a vacation in years, I needed to get the hell out there and enjoy the vacation and the tournament.”

The trip to the Bahamas comes at a time when Gerichten’s health is vastly improved, thanks largely to a dramatic change in his lifestyle.

“(It’s) pretty much in remission now. It came about because I had a skin cancer, so I was being treated for that and they found out through blood tests that I had liver disease,” said Gerichten. “I’ve been fine for the last year without any symptoms, any progression whatsoever, even though they said it was an advanced stage. I’ve changed my eating habits, the way I do things and I haven’t seen any real problems with that anymore.”

In the span of just about two months, Gerichten won the PokerStars Live Festival Atlantic City freeroll, finished 18th in the event, won the PokerStars Live Championship Bahamas Main Event seat freeroll and a $120 event at Borgata in Atlantic City on his birthday.

“It’s just been so much happening in the last six weeks poker-wise that it’s got me so psyched up to play more and more and more poker,” said Gerichten. “I just wish I could afford to play higher stakes, but hopefully I’ll do well in this Bahamas tournament and I’ll the money to back me for higher stakes tournaments.”