Community Successes: 2008 Round-up

Since 2009 just started, it is time to look back and see how our community has been doing in terms of poker earnings. Here are the PokerStrategists who managed to win the most throughout 2008.

A new year kicked off and now it is time for the yearly round-up to see what our community has accomplished throughout 2008. We have selected the ten of the most impressive tournament success stories, so here they are.

The poker world has been through some important changes, if we take into consideration the UIGEA, the pot records being crushed from one month to another, or various other poker-related projects.

While poker does involve a dose of luck, most of these players proved they did not rely on luck to these amounts - since they are usually known in the community for their other poker successes.  Some of them like Maddyhh actually rank among the top internet MTT players and are from fitting the 'one-hit wonder' description. 

blackstone1 opened the major winnings series, placing fourth in the 175k GTD tournament on Unibet. He had to face a field of 1109 players, but only 3 other people managed to rank higher than our member. For his feat, he earned $11,375. In the interview that followed, he told PokerStrategy how he found poker, where does he usually play and more:
"It feels great to have won that much, and I am very happy to have made
it that far. It's still quite unbelievable that I took down so much
cash against so many players! Without Pokerstrategy I would have never made it, so a big thanks to all of
you who made this possible by creating all the articles and videos and for funding my
poker career."

Thorsten 'Thorsten77' Schäfer participated in this year's European Championship of Online Poker and finished in the third place, cashing in the impressive sum of $120,000. 1,277 players joined this $,1000 buy-in tournament and Thorsten77 could have placed higher if his pocket kings would have not run into queens and sevens. Nevertheless, he won one of the most impressive prizes of the year.

k1ngenx had a pretty good year, winning some big prizes in several tournaments throughout the year. However, his biggest achievements including a third place finish in the 750k GTD for $52,500, as well as a fourth place finish in the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl for $24,000.
Another interesting thing happened in the same week, when our NL SH coach, Timor83 won a WSOP sattelite on PartyPoker. Thanks to that, he was granted a WSOP main event package worth $13,500.

Remember we mentioned that poker does involved luck, but winning players prove skill is more important? k1ngenx is a great example: we just mentioned he won a combined $75k in two tournaments, only to get back to him and tell you that he also won the $5k Mixed Limit / No Limit Hold'em event, after defeating Steve "MrSmokey1" Billirakis in heads-up. Thanks to that, he added $50,000 to his bankroll. Did we mention he is 21 years old?

LawDoc took part in a weekend tournament in Las Vegas and we all know about the sums of money they cycle around there. This time was no exception, as he reached the main event stages and finished the tournament in the 38th place, earning $154,000 because of that. We just don't want to know how much the first place finisher won.

Peterbee joined the ranks of happy PokerStrategists for that weekend after he finished
6th in PokerStars' Sunday Million. A swarm (14,187 to be precise) of players joined the tournament, which made his victory taste even sweeter. That 6th place translates to $63,814.50 in case you were curious.

Grezstar did not do bad either: he participated in the 200k GTD on PokerStars the same weekend and only two other players stopped him from taking the grand prize. Even so, he became $12,500 richer thanks to this third place finish, which is obviously good as well.

Once again, another player that proves winning in poker is not luck-based. The German Community member, Maddyhh, has a list of achievements that basically turns him into an instant model for any of our community members. Let't try: a rank 5 in the $109 Rebuy Event on PokerStars for $6,408, a rank 1 in a $36
tournament for $1,782, a $320 No-Limit
Hold'em tourney for $25,006. We could go on. Probably his most impressive win this year is in the World Championship of Online Poker High Roller event. The buy-in for the tournament was $10,000, which is not really affordable for all, but he joined in on the fun and went home with a 12th place diploma and $40,000. He might not have been given a dilpoma.

Big ranking sites mention Maddyhh to be around $400,000 to $500,000 in winnings so far and they wouldn't be wrong. Oh and his ROI is 96% in about 1,300 tournaments. We just thought we'd let you know.

How about that? This French player earned half a million dollars because he won the Titan Poker 2.5M guaranteed! Once again: half-a-million-dollars... The best part is yet to come: according to him, he qualified for the event because he got very lucky in a VIP Titan Freeroll, he showed up 45minutes late for the big tournament and overall he played crappy. We cannot really imagine axp15 bringing his A-game at the tables because that sheer image is just too much to take.

Allanon85 just happened to play in the PokerStars' Sunday Million, along with 7,244 other players. 1,080 places were paid, but that was not what this guy had in mind. No, he went for the big win and he actually did it: he won the 1.5M guaranteed tournament, cashing in $177,450. We thought we would also mention that he placed second and fourth in a couple of $55+ events, where he earned somewhere around $15k, but it sounds pretty weird now, compared to that Sunday Million thing.

Weekends seem to be a good time to win for our PokerStrategists. Once again, they tear up the PokerStars Sunday tournaments like there's no tomorrow.
Exhibit A: TribunCaesar. He participated in the Sunday Warm-up, where a guaranteed $750,000 prize pool was set and the buy-in was $200+$15. No, he did not win the event, he only placed second in a field of 3,645 players and he only received $70,000 thanks to that.
Exhibit B: crackpfeife. He played in the PokerStars Sunday Million, where the guaranteed prize pool was $1.5M. He reached the final table, but he couldn't win the whole thing either - he settled for the second place (out of 7,446 players) and $105,123.
Exhibit C: PokerNoob. He joined the $500+$30 Sunday 500k tournament, just like other 1,003 players did, but unlike these guys, he took home the grand prize of $91,706.25. Ship it!

Krenobelo has been an active member of our community for more than three years now. He had several winnings but nothing compared to what he did in a particular Sunday Million edition: he finished the tournament in 4th place, thus earning more than $70,000 because of that.
We're back to PokerNoob - a deceiving nickname, eh? After winning those 90k, you would think he would just calm down and start buying stuff. Well he pushed it even further and added $14,000 to his bankroll for winning a $109+ event on PokerStars. He also placed fifth in the Sunday 500k and earned himself $25,000 more. Overall, this guy has won more than $200,000 from online poker in 2008 and his profit is around $150,000, if not more. Successful? You might say that.

Déjà-vu, anyone? We told you these guys aren't just lucky. The French player Allanon85 is at it again with another major cash winning. He entered the $500 Full Tilt Poker 1 Million Guarantee and after some hours of play, he was out of the tournament. Out in the fourth place, by the way, and about $65,000 richer. We guess he didn't worry about the holiday presents.

The year of 2008 proved to be quite successful for our members and you can see that if you read this far. We took the liberty of summing up the winnings that were mentioned so far and we can say these guys won about $2 million. Oh and let's remind you that these are only a few of the winnings that our community has recorded throughout 2008 - the +$10,000 winnings. There are so many smaller cash prizes that we could spend all night adding numbers, but believe us - the PokerStrategists had a pretty good year.
We can only wish them good luck in the new year and even more winnings to boost their bankrolls and hopefully we will be able to bring you an even more impressive Community Successes Round-up next year.