Full Tilt’s David Singer, who has been
playing poker for a living since 1996,
won the most challenging poker game
ever assembled and collected $560K for
winning the prestigious title.

Singer captures $25,000 heads-up
championship on Full Tilt and claimed
his sweet victory after he took down
Emil “whitelime” Patel to win the
$560,000 first-place prize.

Before becoming the famous and
wealthy Poker player he is now, Singer
had a brief career working as an
environmental lawyer– yes he was a
lawyer– who specialized in cleaning up
Long Island Sound for a non-profit organization.

Although Singer used to be a lawyer, he was earning less than the secretaries he worked with. He studied to become a lawyer purely so that he could work on environmental issues and his main focus when he gained employment was with water issues, especially concerning the Long Island Sound.

When his hours at work began to be cut back he looked for another job and that is when he came across the reality of playing apoker game.

Remembering his youthful days, playing poker had been a big part of Singer’s life as he played with friends and family from a school age. Aside from playing poker Singer worked on sport-fishing and commercial boats and amazingly, at one time, he even managed to hold two fishing world records which shows that even during his younger days, he was already a record setter who continues to bring in more success up to the present day.

For the first five years venturing into the poker community, Singer focused on his favorite cash game7 card stud exclusively, studying and honing his poker skills at Foxwoods and at a private club in New York.

What really attracted Singer to play poker even more seriously in the last few years, was the big prize pools for No-Limit tournaments.

He knew poker is really for him when he finished ninth at the World Series of Poker Main Event in 2003, and has had numerous large cashes and high finishes since then.

In 2006, this Brooklyn born guy won $435,000 as a third-place finisher at the Word Poker Tournament Caribbean Adventure. After which, he then went on to win the Mirage Heads-Up Poker Showdown for $232,000, and took the sixth place in the $50K HORSE event at the 2006 World Series Online Poker Tourney, where he won another $411,000.

Yes, i know what you are thinking. Money will never be an issue to this guy especially when you found out that he collected $1 million, his biggest ever payday, for winning the Caesars Palace Classic in Las Vegas, added to the $337K for another sixth-place finish when he returned to the $50K HORSE final table in 2007. His career tournament winnings is reportedly in excess of $3.83 million. Whew.

Playing Poker is a game wherein the more information you know about your opponent, the more advantageous your position is. Holding on to more pieces of information will make you most likely beat your opponent. While luck is a big factor in Poker, it is still the struggle for information that is the most important since it enables people to play Poker professionally.

Often times you, as a Poker player, resort into concealing information about yourself, but you also have to be vigilant of what information you want your opponents to see, either intentionally or unintentionally. There will be times when you will wish to let your opponents have some information, as you want to compel your opponents to take certain actions. If your opponents are falling to the information you leaked, you can lead them straight into a disastrous game, or simply cause them to make the wrong turn.

An example of this happened in a nine player sit and go. A good looking player was playing on Poker Stars. He had been getting horrible cards, and went almost an entire level without seeing a single face card. After a long period of folding, He finally picked up a hand, pocket queens. He was on the button, so he had a good hand with good position. However, the second player to act pushed all-in, and at this time his stack was only slightly decreased from his starting stack. Another player called, so he made the proper move for this stage in the tournament: The player threw his hand away. As it turns out, he would have won the hand, as the raiser had Q-8 and the caller held A-K with unremarkable community cards. One player revealed that they had folded A-Q, and after careful deliberation, the good looking player revealed that he had held pocket queens.

Why did he do this? First of all, the other players were starting to realize that he was playing tightly, so by revealing that he had not given in to the temptation to play a big hand in a bad situation, they would come to the conclusion that he truly do only play good cards, and he wouldn’t be making any dumb plays when he held good cards. He wanted to instill fear in them, fear that would cause them to fold when he did raise, as his style relies on aggressively forcing other players out of the pot when he enter a hand.

Just shortly after revealing that he had pocket queens, he started to pick up hands and he was willing to play with in good position. He used these hands to his advantage, raising when he came into the hand, either winning the pot outright or isolating himself against one or two opponents. If he did get callers before the flop, he was always able to make them fold after the flop. His stack was growing, and he became a powerful force at the table without winning a truly big pot.

At one point he, apparently, looked at his stats, and saw that he had seen eleven flops, and had won ten pots. A couple of those wins came preflop, so that slightly skews the numbers, but the only time he saw the flop and didn’t win the hand was when he was playing for cheap from the blinds. Every time he raised before the flop, he won the hand. He had accomplished his goal of getting the other players to fear him. it is also during this time that he had only made it to one showdown, this occurring when he was in the big blind and called the short stack’s all-in, as they only had five more chips than his big blind. He won that pot for the very small win and an elimination.

This is, in reality, a perfect example of what can happen if you take time to analyze carefully all the information that is available and use them to your advantage. Being able to carefully control information is essential if you want to win in Poker and sometimes it is a good idea to leak some information to your benefits.