Online Player of the Year - Jason ‘jdpc27’ Wheeler

Jason “jdpc27” Wheeler was just a guy from Chicago who played poker on the side while working at a job in finance. After a transfer forced a move to San Diego, Wheeler was laid off and left stranded in a different city with no employment.

With limited options and a scarcity of job openings, Wheeler turned his full attention to poker in an effort to pay the bills and provide for his longtime girlfriend and child. After a brief adjustment period, the 33-year-old, slightly profitable sit-and-go player became one of the best multitable-tournament players in the game today.

After nearly bagging a bracelet at his first-ever World Series of Poker, Wheeler began to win online, and has since banked nearly $1 million in tournament earnings in the past two years. With seven final tables and two wins after just one month of play in 2011, he now finds himself near the top of the Online Player of the Year (OPOY) leader board.

Card Player recently caught up with Wheeler, and he discussed his new poker career and the obstacles that he had to overcome to make it work.

Julio Rodriguez: You originally started out as a part-time player before becoming a full-time tournament pro. What made you decide to go for it?

Jason Wheeler: I was a management consultant, working with various banks and finance firms while living in Chicago. I was playing poker casually at the time. I started off by going to my local home game, just like a lot of guys did. I was playing online, as well, but because of my work schedule, I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to multitable tournaments. For that reason, early on, I concentrated mostly on sit-and-gos. I had to travel for my job, and ended up spending a lot of time on the West Coast. Five years ago, I was transferred to San Diego. Unfortunately, I was laid off, which was kind of the motivation that I needed to try to make a living playing poker.

JR: You mentioned that you started off playing sit-and-gos. When did you make the transition to multitable tournaments?

JW: When I got laid off, I suddenly had much more time to try my hand at the bigger tournaments. I was pretty good at sit-and-gos, but multitable tournaments are a completely different animal. Sit-and-gos deal a lot with push-fold situations and learning calling ranges, and although those things are important to know for multitable tournaments, you could say that years of sit-and-go play kind of stunted my growth as a multitable-tournament player. Basically, I was kind of a one-trick pony, and really had a tough transition to learning things such as post-flop board textures and what to do with different stack sizes. I was definitely behind the curve.

JR: What’s the biggest hurdle for sit-and-go players who are making the switch to multitable tournaments?

JW: I think that a lot of it has to do with thinking creatively and outside the box. Even putting your opponent on a certain range of hands becomes more difficult, simply because you are much deeper in a tournament. In sit-and-gos, the hands often just play themselves. I mean, being able to float a flop and check-raise with a draw are skills that you won’t necessarily learn when playing nine- or six-handed sit-and-gos.

JR: How was your first couple of months as a pro?

JW: I really started playing full time in January of 2009. I did well enough to grind out a profit of about $60,000, and took that to the World Series of Poker, looking to get in some live action. It was really intense for me, since it was pretty much my first time playing live. I was really grinding, playing in not only the smaller WSOP events, but also the events at the Venetian Deep-Stack tournament.

I had a goal for the trip of making $40,000 to $50,000, and two weeks into the trip, I had already made the final table of two events at the Venetian, and chopped one of them, meaning I had met my goal. I was going to go home and just call it a successful summer, but my friends insisted that I stay a little while longer and put some more of that money into the WSOP. Fortunately for me, I wound up getting heads up in event No. 54 before losing and cashing for $418,000. Obviously, I was disappointed that I didn’t take the bracelet, but considering that it was my first Series, I couldn’t be too upset with a second and nearly half a million dollars.

JR: At 33, you’re a little older than the typical online professional.

JW: Most people don’t realize that I’m older, to be honest. I usually pass for mid-20s, and it helps that I still listen to the same music those other guys listen to, and still dress pretty similarly. I’m just more of an “in moderation” guy now. Some of the younger guys didn’t have the college experience, so they want to go out and get super smashed. I’ll go out and have a few drinks, but I’m not going to overdo it, because I treat poker as a job, first and foremost.

JR: You got your degree in management information systems from the University of Illinois in Champaign, but a lot of people have sacrificed their educations in order to jump right into life as a poker player. Do you think it’s wise for players to compete without a backup plan?

JW: You just can’t reproduce the college experience. I think missing that experience is hard, because it was responsible for a lot of my development as an adult. You’re on your own in dealing with finances, and are juggling your schedule without anyone telling you where to be. In this profession, there are a lot of egos and money flying around, not to mention the stress. Basically, there are not a lot of people around to catch you when you start falling. You are forced to catch yourself, and that’s a skill that many in the online community never got a chance to learn.

I get a little worried for some people, to be honest. If you’re not careful enough to plan and save well, you can end up giving back everything you’ve won, and more. That being said, with the economy being what it is, I can’t really fault people for trying to earn money in any way that they can. How do you tell a kid who is winning hundreds of thousands of dollars to finish school and then try to find a job? It’s just like the sports world. It’s really difficult to tell an athlete who has a talent not to pursue it.

JR: Looking back, are you glad that you were laid off?

JW: When I was laid off, I was playing poker basically out of desperation, just to have something to pay the bills. I wasn’t some young kid who could shrug off being broke, since I had real financial obligations to uphold. But now, I can honestly say that getting laid off was a blessing in disguise, because it gave me the motivation I needed to make poker work for me. I’m making much more money than I was as a management consultant, and I have a higher quality of life; so, obviously, I can’t complain. I love what I do, which is something that not a lot of people can say.

2011 Online Player of the Year Standings