A former trader turned poker expert believes his staggering tournament winnings have provided long-term financial freedom for his family.
Martins Adeniya, 39, won his highest sum of money to date three weeks ago as he claimed £512,000 at the Hollywood-based Lucky Hearts Open, calling his opponents bluff and pocketing the winnings with a river flush.
In such an important period in his life, the biggest win of the Londoner’s career so far couldn’t have come at a better time, and has given Adeniya the luxury of choosing when he wants to actively participate in tournaments or take time off to spend with his loved ones.
Adeniya said: “We’re just getting married and just having a baby. My main priority now is to provide the best life I can for my son, and that allows freedom to choose your own schedule.
“I can choose to not do anything today, I can choose to make it a full day, it’s all up to me ultimately.
“So, because I set my schedule, it means that I don’t have to ask anyone for maternity leave, paternity leave, and my wife has the option of taking as long as she wants with maternity leave.
“I don’t know how much of an impact having a son is going to change my life going forward, so a lot of it I’m going to have to figure out as it comes.”
The British player has come a long way since his introduction to the poker scene 16 years ago, where he collected his first winnings of £887 on debut at the London Poker Masters.
He needed little time to adjust as he followed his first tournament winnings with an impressive £25,027 at the 40th World Series of Poker in Vegas, a telling sign that Adeniya was capable of climbing up the ladder.
Adeniya explained how formative his background was to his success to date.
His skill-set helped him to earn more from poker than from his finance job which was a clear indicator that he was ready to make the transition to becoming a professional.
He said: “Poker really became a bit more serious when I had a work internship. They gave me a day’s work to do in a week.
“I had four days, so I figured in this time I would read all that poker material that was out there, which was back in those days, books on the internet, like the supersystems – and over the course of the next few months, I managed to run that up to $20,000 by an online cash game.
“I turned 21 that summer, took that $20,000 out to Vegas with me, and figured I could jump in to play the thing that I was playing where it was online. The thing I didn’t factor in was I’d never played in the casino before, never played against professionals and real people.
“I got third place in an online tournament for 200,000, which gave me the confidence to be able to quit my job and go out to Vegas to play my first-ever World Series.”
Adeniya was able to provide some advice to newcomers as well, in terms of how they should evaluate the risk factors attached to gambling.
He said: “If you’ve got a bankroll of $10,000, you don’t start playing $1,000 events because that’s going to go very quickly.
“You need to start at a much lower level and build up, and not jump too hard into risk.
“Somebody great once said, if they had a job of cutting down a tree and they had six hours to cut down the tree, they’d spend the first four hours sharpening their axe.
“The beauty of poker is that you have a choice. I would say that it’s best to never get into any sort of debt, take any sort of credit to play poker.”
Despite a shift in priorities, Adeniya doesn’t plan to walk away from poker, with ambitions to achieve further success.
Indeed, he will feature at UK’s Poker Open being held in Coventry between 20 February and 2 March, with a prize pool of £1,000,000 up for grabs in the main events.
He said: “Moving forward, my plan is to be the best player in the UK that I can be.
“So in doing that, I expect more wins to come, I expect more financial security to come through that, and more opportunities going forward. So yeah, looking forward to that.”
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