Last year Andy Frankenberger made the difficult decision to leave his secure and highly paid job as an Equities Derivatives Trader on Wall Street and become a professional poker player. The gamble, for want of a better word, seems to have paid off for the 38-year old as he went on a massive heater during 2010, was crowned the World Poker Tour’s Player of the Year and now he has a World Series of Poker bracelet to his name.
In 2010 he decided to become a regular on the live tournament circuit and began entering some mid-stakes events around the United States of America. His first cash in a major tournament was for $2,411 in a $1,000 buy-in event at the Borgata Winter Open in Atlantic City in January and he followed that up with two more cashes in March that combined netted him close to $17,000.
These results must have given him great confidence because in the second half of 2010 he exploded into the public domain and put in some amazing results. First he cashed in a $5,000 No Limit Hold’em event at the 2010 WSOP for his then largest score of $20,845 but during the WSOP he took some time away from the Rio to play in a $2,000 deep-stacked tournament at the Venetian and what a decision it was as he took it down for $162,110. Less than a month later and he won the WPT Legends of Poker Main Event for a cool $750,000 and followed that up with a final table appearance at WPT Festa Al Lago, a result that netted him a further $161,200.
He ended 2010 with more than $1,200,000 in winnings and he has just added almost $600,000 more to that total by winning Event #28, the $1,500 No Limit Hold’em tournament at this year’s World Series of Poker. He outlasted a massive field of 2,500 players to get his hands on the most sought after piece of poker jewellery on the planet and a bankroll boosting $599,153. When asked, moments after winning the tournament, how it felt to become a WSOP bracelet winner Frankenberger said, “For me, it’s so important for me to get this win. When I won the Legends and I won the Venetian, poker was very new to me. I had not invested that much into it in terms of time or energy. At this point, I have been playing all year. I have been travelling all over the world. This is my first big win of 2011, so I can’t even begin to tell you how much this win means to me right now.”
Final table payouts
1st: Andy Frankenberger: $599,153
2nd: Joshua Evans: $372,498
3rd: Robert Shortway: $263,655
4th: Owen Crowe: $190,147
5th: Tyler Kenney: $138,847
6th: Steven Merrifield: $102,600
7th: Thaeo Nguyen: $76,747
8th: Sidney Hasson: $58,083
9th: Bret Hruby: $44,482
* Frankenberger’s lifetime results quoted from The Hendon Mob database
