It's Deep... Mega DeepOne of the most popular tournaments on 888 Poker is the $100,000 Mega Deep. It takes place every week on this gigantic online poker room and Costa Rica's John POKER_PANDA Harris (pictured) has recently made it his personal playground. Right before Christmas last year, he won it for $26,000. In the last three months of 2012, he also recorded two second place finishes and a fifth place finish in the Mega Deep for about $40,000 total and made its final table three times in December alone.
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NoteCaddy Edge is an add-on package to NoteCaddy and Holdem Manager 2. Everything is configured for you already, with five different packages to choose from. Whether you are a specialist in tournaments, sit and gos, or cash games, you can have one of the best software setups you can imagine.
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“The structure is one of the better things about it,” Harris told PocketFives when asked why he has had so much success. “It has a 10,000-chip starting stack with 30-minute levels and usually gets around 550 runners. The structure and the fact that they run satellites all week helps, but in the end, I think I just happened to run hot in one tournament to win it.”
He added, “The structure fits well to my playing style. The first two times I got second, I ran hot and seemed to have chips most of the tournament. In the first one, I was very lucky to have A-Q > K-K nine-handed and in the second one, I had K-K beat A-A early on and just coasted from there. The third one was different. Once we got in the money, I was the short stack forever, sitting 27/28, 12/13, and 9/9 at the final table. I was fortunate to run hot at every final table, which helps.”
Harris relocated to Costa Rica through Poker Refugees, a popular service that many players have taken advantage of in order to move to online poker-friendly countries. You'll love how his decision to relocate happened: “I was living in Lake Tahoe during the middle of a dry winter waiting for snow and freezing my butt off and thought about how much I would like to be sitting on the beach somewhere. I started thinking about relocating to a beach town somewhere and trying to grind poker.”
He hadn't played much poker in the previous two years and didn't have enough top-tier scores to ditch the United States for the sake of a career, at least initially. Did we mention he was working at a frigid ski resort? He continued, “I had a job at a ski resort and had spent the previous two years living in the area just exploring. I had some savings from a previous job, rented some land, and learned how to farm organically.” We promise we're not making this up – he farmed organically and worked at a ski resort.
“The main catalyst for me poker-wise was meeting some other players who were way better than I,” he said on his final decision to migrate to Central America. “Professionally, Costa Rica has been better than I expected. Personally, I was lucky to meet some new friends, had some great times, and was able to live in a tropical paradise for a year. It's really tough to complain.”
The hot topic in the poker world this week has been the passage of New Jersey's intrastate online gambling bill into law. Games will be firing up sometime in the future, so we asked Harris if he'd consider returning to the U.S. to continue his career. He explained, “Eventually. On the one hand, almost everyone wants to travel the world and explore or just get up and start over, but on the other hand, I miss my friends and family and like being back in the States. Also, I'm not sure poker is my lifelong career.”
He plays as kate_upton on 888 Poker and closed by recognizing a few players who have helped him along the way: misttheflop, bigwilber420, and throwinphins. He said, “All are really sick players who are great at different things in poker. It's insane how much they have helped my game.”
Harris has been a card-carrying member of PocketFives since Year 2 for us in 2006 and contributed nearly 4,600 posts to the site.
Now for some housekeeping. Sign up for 888 Poker through PocketFives to get a special 100% up to $600 deposit bonus (100% up to $400 for the general public) as well as one free month of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived if you make a deposit (a $65 value). You need to download 888 through our links in order to get both, so click here to get started.
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NoteCaddy Edge is an add-on package to NoteCaddy and Holdem Manager 2. Everything is configured for you already, with five different packages to choose from. Whether you are a specialist in tournaments, sit and gos, or cash games, you can have one of the best software setups you can imagine.
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“The structure is one of the better things about it,” Harris told PocketFives when asked why he has had so much success. “It has a 10,000-chip starting stack with 30-minute levels and usually gets around 550 runners. The structure and the fact that they run satellites all week helps, but in the end, I think I just happened to run hot in one tournament to win it.”
He added, “The structure fits well to my playing style. The first two times I got second, I ran hot and seemed to have chips most of the tournament. In the first one, I was very lucky to have A-Q > K-K nine-handed and in the second one, I had K-K beat A-A early on and just coasted from there. The third one was different. Once we got in the money, I was the short stack forever, sitting 27/28, 12/13, and 9/9 at the final table. I was fortunate to run hot at every final table, which helps.”
Harris relocated to Costa Rica through Poker Refugees, a popular service that many players have taken advantage of in order to move to online poker-friendly countries. You'll love how his decision to relocate happened: “I was living in Lake Tahoe during the middle of a dry winter waiting for snow and freezing my butt off and thought about how much I would like to be sitting on the beach somewhere. I started thinking about relocating to a beach town somewhere and trying to grind poker.”He hadn't played much poker in the previous two years and didn't have enough top-tier scores to ditch the United States for the sake of a career, at least initially. Did we mention he was working at a frigid ski resort? He continued, “I had a job at a ski resort and had spent the previous two years living in the area just exploring. I had some savings from a previous job, rented some land, and learned how to farm organically.” We promise we're not making this up – he farmed organically and worked at a ski resort.
“The main catalyst for me poker-wise was meeting some other players who were way better than I,” he said on his final decision to migrate to Central America. “Professionally, Costa Rica has been better than I expected. Personally, I was lucky to meet some new friends, had some great times, and was able to live in a tropical paradise for a year. It's really tough to complain.”
The hot topic in the poker world this week has been the passage of New Jersey's intrastate online gambling bill into law. Games will be firing up sometime in the future, so we asked Harris if he'd consider returning to the U.S. to continue his career. He explained, “Eventually. On the one hand, almost everyone wants to travel the world and explore or just get up and start over, but on the other hand, I miss my friends and family and like being back in the States. Also, I'm not sure poker is my lifelong career.”
He plays as kate_upton on 888 Poker and closed by recognizing a few players who have helped him along the way: misttheflop, bigwilber420, and throwinphins. He said, “All are really sick players who are great at different things in poker. It's insane how much they have helped my game.”
Harris has been a card-carrying member of PocketFives since Year 2 for us in 2006 and contributed nearly 4,600 posts to the site.
Now for some housekeeping. Sign up for 888 Poker through PocketFives to get a special 100% up to $600 deposit bonus (100% up to $400 for the general public) as well as one free month of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived if you make a deposit (a $65 value). You need to download 888 through our links in order to get both, so click here to get started.
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