UK Player Wins $142,000 On PokerStars Sunday Warm-up Tournament

Alan Lake, of Thorney Leys, Witney said he was considering early retirement after taking down the ‘PokerStars $750,000 guarantee Sunday Warm-up’ and earning himself a cool $142,000 (£91,680) in the process.
The 53 year-old engineer and father-of-one said he originally planned on retiring in 2009 but had to put his plan on hold after the recession hit. Mr Lake said he now intends on taking his pension later this year and buying a house-to-let as an investment.
Alan Lake has been playing online poker for seven years and usually plays for a couple of hours twice a week, at stakes of between $10 and $50. However, on Sunday February 14th, Alan decided to try his luck at PokerStars’ Sunday Warm-up tournament and so shelled out the $215 buy-in fee, along with another 4,557 hopefuls.
The tournament got underway at 6pm and little did he suspect at the time he would still be playing at his computer 9 hours later. Around four hours into the competition Alan, known as ‘smacl02’ online, had at least assured the return of his entry fee when he survived the bubble breaking with 675 players left in the competition. The next bubble occurred several hours later when Alan Lake knocked out ‘route666’ in tenth place ($5,468.40) thus setting up the final table showdown.
Eventually, it wasn’t until 3am that Alan found himself heads-up against opponent ‘B DA cards’ who pushed all-in holding A 3, only to be called by Alan holding A 4. Quite often these situations end in a split pot but the board ran 2s 5c Jc Ah 3d giving Alan ‘smacl02’ Lake the straight and the $142,982.61 first place prize.
Commenting on his incredible poker victory, Mr Lake said: “It was quite surreal really.. As each person was knocked out, I was looking at how much money there was. I think I would have been done for if I hadn’t won it, but there was just a lot of adrenaline, even though I had to go to work at 6am. I had to go upstairs and wake up my wife. I don’t think she really believed it until the morning and she got up and I showed her the evidence.”