Online Player of the Year Spotlight -- Jason 'jdpc27' WheelerWheeler Explains Why He Was Fortunate To Lose His Job |
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The Card Player Online Player of the Year (OPOY) award honors the best tournament player across the major online sites in a given calendar year. Previous winners have included greats such as Isaac “westmenloAA” Baron, Alexander “AJKHoosier1” Kamberis, Steve “gboro780” Gross and Taylor “ambiguosity” Paur. Here, we take a look at one of the current top contenders.
Jason “jdpc27” Wheeler was just a guy from Chicago, playing poker on the side as he worked 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 scarce 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 transitional period, the 33-year-old transformed himself from a slightly profitable sit-n-go player to one of the best multi-table 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 earnings in the past two years. With seven final tables and two wins after just one month of play, he now finds himself near the top of the OPOY leader board.
Card Player caught up with Wheeler to discuss his new poker career and the obstacles he had to overcome to make it work.
Julio Rodriguez: You originally started out as a part-time player before making the switch to a full-time tournament pro. What made you decide to go for it?
Jason Wheeler: I was working as 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 multi-table tournaments. For that reason, early on I concentrated mostly on sit-n-gos. I had to travel for my job and ended up spending a lot of time on the west coast. Five years ago, I transferred out to San Diego. Unfortunately, I was laid off, which was kind of the motivation I needed to try and make a living playing poker.
JR: You mentioned that you started off playing sit-n-gos. When did you transition to multi-table tournaments?
JW: Once I got laid off, I suddenly had much more time to try my hand at the bigger tournaments. I was pretty good at sit-n-gos, but multi-table tournaments are a completely different animal. Sit-n-gos deal a lot with push-fold situations and learning calling ranges and although those are important things to know for tournaments, you could say years of sit-n-gos kind of stunted my growth as a tournament player. Basically, I was kind of a one-trick pony and really had a tough transition into 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-n-go players making the switch to multi-table tournaments?
JW: I think 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-n-gos, the hands often just played themselves. I mean, being able to float a flop or check-raise with a draw are skills you won’t necessarily learn playing exclusively nine- or six-handed sit-n-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 I 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 not only in the smaller WSOP events, but also the events at the Venetian Deepstacks.
I had a goal for the trip of making $40,000 to $50,000 and two weeks into the trip, I had already final tabled two events at the Venetian and chopped one of them, meaning I had met my goal. I was going to just come home and 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 to Tony Veckey and cashing for $418,000. Obviously I was disappointed that I didn’t take the bracelet, but considering it was my first summer, I couldn’t be too upset with a second and nearly half of 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-twenties 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 Champaigne, but a lot of people in your profession sacrificed their education in order to jump right into life as a poker player. Do you think it’s wise for players to compete without a back up plan?
JW: You just can’t reproduce the college experience. I think missing that experience is hard because I credit that with a lot of my development into an adult. You’re on your own dealing with finances and you are juggling your schedule without anyone telling you where to be. In this profession, there’s 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. It’s a dirty game we play and 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 anybody for trying to earn money any way they can get it. 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 you were laid off?
JW: At the time when I was laid off, I was basically just playing poker 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 way 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.
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