The winner of the 2011 Online Player of the Year award has been named by Card Player as Jason ‘jdpc27′ Wheeler with 8,076 OPOY Points and $768,877 in winnings.
However, Black Friday threatened to put a premature end to the US pro’s thriving career, who then was forced into taking the bold step of moving to Mexico to continue his work.
“..my livelihood was in jeopardy…I already had a vacation home near Rosarito, Mexico before everything went down on Black Friday, but obviously having another residence wound up being huge for me after it became impossible to play online in the United States,” explained Wheeler.
After settling full-time into his new location, Jason ‘jdpc27′ Wheeler picked-up from where he left off, although he had to concentrate more on playing at PokerStars and just a handful of smaller online networks, whilst cutting his work load down to around three days a week.
The rest is history and Wheeler continued his solid 2011, finishing ahead of such players as Mike ‘CuteIsWhatIAim4’ Telker in 2nd place with 6,822 OPOY points and $1,075,643 in winnings, or Chris ‘Moorman1’ Moorman in 7th place with 5,438 OPOY points and $655,004 in winnings.
Jason Wheeler first got started as a poker pro after losing his job as a management consultant, before turning to poker in order to pay his bills and support his girlfriend and child.
Already adept at sit-n-gos, Jason ‘jdpc27′ Wheeler now had enough free time to fully concentrate on the more lucrative multi-table tournaments. However, a certain amount of adjustments had to be made for the different format, and as he explains:
“Sit-n-gos deal a lot with push-fold situations and learning calling ranges and although those are important things to know for tournaments..learning things such as post-flop board textures and what to do with different stack sizes [was important for MTT's].”
The 33 year-old has now gone on to amass an impressive $2,879,750 in online earnings in a career dating back to 2006, as well as a further $696,593 playing live.
