One player who has been doing quite well on playing online in recent years is bracelet winner Daniel "centrfieldr" Lupo, 37, of West Milford, New Jersey. You might recall in 2019, Lupo topped a 1,767-entry field to win the WSOP.com Online $500 NLH Turbo Deepstack for $145,274 and a gold bracelet. Last year, he added a ring to his résumé by taking down the WSOP.com Online Circuit Event #3: $320 NLH 6-Max for $32,595 and a month later won the WSOP.com $100,000 GTD Sunday for $50,715.
PokerNews caught up with Lupo, who went to NJIT for Architecture and baseball, to ask him about poker, which he squeezes in between working for an Architecture firm in Bridgewater specializing in single-family residential and smaller commercial projects and his family, which includes three kids ages 2-5 and his supportive wife Laura.
PokerNews: When and how did you learn to play poker?
Lupo: I started playing/learning in college during the Rounders and Moneymaker boom with a bunch of the baseball guys. Within a year I found myself hosting games at college, at home on breaks and basically anywhere I could find or make a game. I didn’t play much online early on, regrettably.
What sort of poker do you play these days?
Mostly online MTTs playing like three sessions per week on average with buy-ins typically from $50 to $1k with the occasional $2-$3k buy in for a big event. I average around 500-600 MTTs a month despite not playing full time, I tend to put in a lot of volume when I’m on. The games are mostly NLH and some PLO MTTs, but love when StarsNJ runs a series as they run a fun 8-Game MTT with a bunch of other mixed variants.
What’s it like to play poker while raising young children?
It’s been a constant evolution. I could probably write a book about all the highs and lows and life adjustments I’ve had or chose to make. It gives me a lot of inspiration to succeed while also adding some weight to my losses as it's like 'not only was I way from my kids for all of Sunday afternoon but I lost (insert obnoxious Sunday schedule cost here)'.
Daniel Lupo and his family. (Photo c/o Daniel Lupo)
What are some of your poker goals?
Try and win everything I play. Actually, my biggest current goal is trying to optimize my MTT game selection. Since quarantine began the schedules have been exploding site to site and while it's been great, with lots of new players and lots of live players playing online it has also drastically increased my average buy-ins and session costs as well as the field size which further increases variance.
I'm trying to optimize the balance of table quantity and expected value vs individual session costs and the variance that comes with it. Having an average buy-in of $250 adds up pretty quickly when it's spread across 60+ entries on a Sunday. My biggest ongoing and long-term goal is to win enough to help my family live comfortably.
Lupo is in action today looking to make a run at his second gold bracelet.
Every day, viewers at home will have access to watching the biggest names hunt for bracelets. In conjunction with PokerNews, Jeff Platt will host early action from each tournament at twitch.tv/jeffplatt, starting around the money bubble each day and taking players all the way to the final table.
“I am thrilled to team up with PokerNews to present coverage of the 2021 WSOP Online,” said Platt, who is a co-host of the PokerNews Podcast. “We learned last year that the prestige of bracelet events draws an incredibly passionate audience on Twitch. I can’t wait to interact with that audience again as we crown poker’s newest champions.”
After Platt’s streams, coverage will then shift to twitch.tv/pokernews where PokerNews’ own Jesse Fullen will cover final table action alongside a rotating cast of co-hosts including Alec Torelli, Ryan Laplante, Jesse Sylvia, KL Cleeton, Rampage Poker, and Jaman Burton, among others. The streams will also be featured on YouTube and Facebook.
“WSOP Online will certainly be the biggest online series of the year in the USA. We’re thrilled PokerNews has again stepped up to provide fans a way to follow the action,” said Ty Stewart, Executive Director of the WSOP. “Jeff Platt’s personal streams were a highlight of last year’s online series and we have no doubt the PokerNews final table streams will be an entertaining watch.”
The World Series of Poker $50,000 Poker Players Championship (PPC), which was created in 2006, is considered the tournament where the best of the best take on one another and duke it out in a variety of poker games, a reflection of all-around poker skill. Imagine playing the likes of Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, and Daniel Negreanu five days in a row in a short-handed mixed format.
Needless to say, the hefty price tag coupled with a small, elite field created a legacy for the PPC where champions are considered among the greatest overall poker players. A quick glance at its 14-year history shows nothing but greatness among champions, from John Hennigan to Mike Gorodinsky, and with the late David "Chip" Reese as perhaps the event's most fitting inaugural winner back in 2006.
Winning once is the poker professional's dream. Winning two? You're in a league of your own. But winning the toughest event with poker's best three times? Only one man achieved that improbable feat on this day back in 2018, after winning his first two titles in 2010 and 2012: Michael Mizrachi.
A player that looked poised for a breakout prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic was Kevin "GoneBananas" Garosshen, and even after casinos closed down for an extended period of time, Garosshen spent last year's WSOP Online Series continuing to produce solid results that cemented his status as a player on the rise.
Garosshen's big breakout occurred at one of the last live events before the heart of the pandemic, as he took down the $1,650 HPT St. Louis Main Event for $131,184 after topping a field of 392 entrants. Garosshen then set his sights on the 2020 WSOP Online Series, and went to work immediately, finishing in third-place in Event #3: $1,000 NLH Deepstack 8-Max for $73,424. Garosshen ended up with a total of nine cashes in the 2020 WSOP Online.
So far this year, Garosshen has had a smattering of success on the felt, including two deep runs in side events at the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, and a nineteenth-place finish in last month's WPT Tampa Championship. Garosshen will be looking to have another successful summer on the virtual felt, and add a WSOP Gold Bracelet to his HPT Title.
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