1. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Tournaments
2. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Player
3. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Odds
4. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Rules
5. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Table
6. Ben Wilinofsky Poker Tournament

Ben Wilinofsky is 24 years old. He's Canadian, a hockey lover, and the kind of guy who likes to roll around with his dog. He's won $3 million in online poker tournaments. He has $1.25 million in live tournament earnings, a big chunk of which came when he won EPT Berlin two years ago. Ben Wilinofsky may have made a name for himself playing poker online, but he has shown that he can hold his own in live tournaments, as well. The Canadian player emerged victorious at the recent.

Ben Wilinofsky Poker Tournaments

After a layoff since early May, the European Poker Tour (EPT) is finally back in action with EPT Barcelona. The Main Event kicked off Monday with 554 players registering for Day 1A and 44 paying for one re-entry (this is a single re-entry event). Ben Wilinofsky is the chip leader of the 202 remaining players with 330,000 chips after Level 10.

Ben Wilinofsky would stick with the hip-hop vibe plumping for Harmony Homicide by Kool G Rap. Nesrine Reilly is another one of those Hip Hop loving poker players. The French starlet would saunter down to the table listening to the sounds of Drake and Started From The Bottom. Ben Wilinofsky is an online pro who has amassed $5,233,921 in winnings under the screen name NeverScaredB, including $3,674,788 earned on PokerStars. In terms of live tournaments, the player’s.

Right now, it is Ben Wilinofsky and everybody else. After Wilinofsky, the second place player, Haoxiang Wang, has 239,300 chips, nearly 100,000 chips behind. And with stacks at those levels, 100,000 chips is massive. Six more players have over 200,000 chips, so it is a tight race behind the pole setter.

In a tournament, being dealt pocket Aces right away is one of those things you either love or dread. Clearly, Aces are awesome, but you know that if push comes to shove, you are going to have to go to the mat with them pre-flop, so there’s always a chance you get bounced before you even get comfortable. Now, Wilinofsky didn’t get Aces on the first hand, but those hole cards showed up for him in the first level of the day. According to the PokerNews.com report, Wilinofsky moved all-in on a board of T♥-3♦-7♦-J♦ and Max Silver made the call with Queens. No luck for Silver on the river and Wilinofsky quickly had almost double his starting stack.

Silver was a good sport, though, posting on Twitter, “Haven’t busted an EPT level one in a while, feels like old times.”

Wilinofsky has a short live tournament resume, but it is a nice one. He has just six recorded cashes, but his very first was a win in another European Poker Tour Main Event, the 2011 EPT Berlin, where he won €825,000, or about $1,174,143. That makes up the vast majority of Wilinofsky’s earnings total, but he also had a six-figure cash at the 2012 WPT Vienna Main Event, where he placed third.

Online poker is Wilinofsky’s forte, though, where he has millions in tournament cashes.

It’s been a tough road to this point for Wilinofsky. At the end of 2015, he decided to retire from professional poker to address his mental health. Suffering from depression, he realized, as he told PokerListings in 2016, that he “was looking for external ways to fix an internal problem.”

That WPT Vienna final table was a key event, as he said he was “devoid of any kind of emotional response” when most people would either be thrilled with the finish, disappointed in getting so close to the win and falling short, or some of both.

“No matter how things get on the outside,” he told PokerNews, “it doesn’t really change anything for more than a couple of days.”

It will always be an ongoing battle for Wilinofsky, as it is with anyone who is trying to tackle depression or another mental health challenge. But he is there in Barcelona, kicking some butt through Day 1A, waiting to see what Day 2 has in store, along with a couple hundred competitors.

2018 European Poker Tour Barcelona Main Event – Day 1A Chip Leaders

1. Ben Wilinofsky – 330,000
2. Haoxiang Wang – 239,300
3. Miguel Use – 228,900
4. Lawrence Bayley – 224,200
5. Kalidou Sow – 220,000
6. Benjamin Pollak – 219,800
7. Upeshka De Silva – 218,100
8. Antoine Labat – 210,800
9. Adrian State – 186,200
10. Luis Rodriguez Cruz – 182,400

At the end of 2015 poker pro Ben Wilinofsky announced his retirement from poker, despite a long and successful career playing cards.

In this candid interview with PokerListings.com, Wilinofsky opens up about the reasons behind that decision and the inner struggles he faced over the course of his poker career.

In the poker world Wilinofsky is known as NeverScaredB, the screen-name he chose for himself when he began playing. Years of battling online and live earned him that reputation, but for Wilinofsky it didn't match up with how he felt.

No External Poker Success Enough

Wilinofsky explains that no matter how much external success he was able to achieve, it was never enough. Now Wilinofsky has given up a career that offered him money and freedom to pursue happiness.

Watch the full video interview below or continue reading for the interview transcript.

PokerListings.com: Did your choice of online poker screenname have anything to do with how you were feeling back then? On the outside you definitely earned a reputation for fearless play.

Ben Wilinofsky Poker Player

Ben Wilinofsky: I wanted to put that image of myself forward, of fearlessness, and I wanted to feel fearless.

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You know, that's something I'd like to feel nowadays in my everyday life, not anxious and not have those doubts and fears in my head.

Maybe there was something Freudian going on. I don't really know.

PL: You accomplished a lot in poker and lived a lot of people's dreams, so to speak. How did those experiences make you feel?

BW: When I was getting outside stimulus from poker that said, “Yes, you're good. Look at the numbers getting bigger and look at how people respond to you and think of you.

You have fans and people who think that you're good and you have objective measures.

It's a salve. It's something you rub on the wounds to make them not hurt so much but it doesn't heal them in any sense.

PL: Right. So as things started to get better and better in your career, did you start to see this disparity developing between the external state of your life, and the way you felt inside which maybe wasn't tracking the same trajectory?

BW: Yeah. When I got that first win I felt elated and really just sort of on cloud nine, for lack of a better term, for a couple of days but it faded really quickly.

I quickly returned to, like, normal and my normal was not very good. My normal was not happy.

So I think I chased it for a little bit. I think the next year I final-tabled WPT Vienna. I came third and I just felt nothingness. Just empty, devoid of any kind of emotional response.

I realized that I was looking for external ways to fix an internal problem.

Ben Wilinofsky Poker Rules

PL: Did your family and the people closest to you know what was going on or did you try to play it off like everything was fine and try to deal with it on your own?

BW: I don't think I tried to deal with it at all. I don't think I really acknowledged it to myself.

I was aware of it at times. The word depression, you know, came in and out of my vocabulary and I would sometimes think to myself, “Huh, I'm depressed.”

But it was always in the context of it being a temporary state and that I needed to make things better so I'm not so depressed anymore.

Ben Wilinofsky Poker Table

PL: Like win more money.

BW: Like win more money or have sex with more girls or whatever thing.

Like, if I achieve some thing, when that thing is achieved my depression and sense of self worth will sort themselves out based on that thing.

No matter how big either number gets, you never get there.

To put it out there and to be honest and open with someone else about what's really going on in your life, it's liberating because you don't have to put up walls anymore.

Ben Wilinofsky Poker Tournament

You don't have to put on this mask, this brave face that everything's okay and you're in control of your life.

But now that I have accepted and identified the problem, what next?

PL: It's not just all magically fixed.

BW: No. So you try one thing. Therapy or pills or exercise or yoga or meditation or whatever you try. And you try and you try and you try again. I've tried a lot of things.

Poker's not the problem but it's not part of the solution either.

My energy is really limited. On my bad days I get six hours out of bed. And those six hours are precious and I can't be spending it on something that's not part of the solution.

Poker is the easy solution to the wrong problem and I don't want to do that anymore. So I just have to not do it anymore, is the simple answer.

I have to go start on the bottom of something else and I have to dig in and keep going with it until I either hit a wall and realize this isn't the thing, or I get through the wall and see what's on the other side.