BY STORMS REBACK

BY NOW, IT’S BECOME CLEAR THAT YOU needn’t have spent half your life fading the white line in Texas as a road gambler or acquired calluses on your ass grinding out a living in a cardroom to become a professional poker player. Two of the most common training grounds for many of today’s top pros involve games that seem better suited for small children.

The influence of Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game with over 6 million devotees worldwide, first gained prominence in the poker world after David Williams fell just short of winning the world title at the 2004 World Series of Poker. How did he learn how to read his opponents and crunch numbers under intense pressure so well? The same way Brock Parker, Alex Borteh, Eric Froehlich, Eric Kesselman, Justin Bonomo, Noah Boeken, Isaac Haxton, Scott Seiver, Jeff Garza, and Adam Levy did, by playing

Magic for countless hours on the game’s professional tour.

While Magic’s influence on professional poker has been written about at great length, the impact that Starcraft, a real-time strategy video game that has sold over 11 million copies, has had on the game has yet to receive the same amount of attention. The reason for this mostly has to do with the anonymity of the online world. Because Magic is a more social game, its players tend to gravitate toward live poker, whereas Starcraft is played on computers so its players are more comfortable playing the game online.

Several ex-Starcraft players have been able to make the jump to playing live tournaments (see sidebar), but none has done it in such a dramatic fashion as Bertrand Grospellier. In the past two years, this ex-Starcraft pro has won over $5-million on the professional poker tour, and, if he can keep up this incredible pace, he could end up being one of the greatest No-Limit Hold ’Em tournament players of all-time.

Like Tiger Woods demonstrating his golfing prowess on The Mike Douglas Show when he was just two years old, Grospellier found his calling at an age when his peers were still struggling to form complete sentences. He started playing video games against his brother when he was three, and, even more remarkable, he won more often than not.

With the release of Starcraft in 1998, his childhood obsession was given the opportunity to blossom into something a bit more understandable to those around him, a career. Grospellier started playing Starcraft tournaments in his native France, but, seeking a greater challenge, he set his sights on South Korea where the game was loved with almost religious intensity. In the decade following its release, over 4.5 million copies of the game were sold in South Korea, and its professional gaming scene flourished with tournaments getting broadcast on television and professional gamers receiving lucrative sponsorships. It was the big leagues, and Grospellier wanted in, but there was just one problem: college. He’d gotten into an advanced mathematics school. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that the academic life wasn’t for him.

“I went to college to become an engineer, but after just one week I was bored,” he explained in a conversation with ALL IN. “I said, ‘I don’t want to study anymore. I just want to play video games.’ I’d heard that Starcraft was really big in South Korea and you could make a living playing it, so it became my goal to move there and become a video game professional. I knew if I went to school and became an engineer I would regret it all my life.”

In 2001, at the age of 20, Grospellier moved to Seoul, following in the footsteps of Guillaume “Grrrr” Patry, one of his best friends who was already there making a living playing Starcraft. Grospellier enjoyed almost immediate success, finishing in the top five at the World Cyber Games every year from 2001 to 2003. In a country where successful gamers are treated like rock stars, Grospellier strutted around town like Mick Jagger. He dyed his shoulder-length hair bright pink, wore outlandish outfits, and rarely, if ever, removed his sunglasses from his face. The Koreans loved him, and he loved them right back, diving headfirst into their culture.

He also acquired a nickname that has stuck with him ever since. “When I was living in South Korea, the Koreans couldn’t pronounce my first name, Bertrand,” he explained. “They couldn’t pronounce the ‘r.’ So I told them to call me ‘ElkY.’ It was much easier for everyone to remember and to pronounce so I just kept it that way.”

As it turned out, the hardest adjustment for him in Korea was trying to keep up with competitors who routinely trained for 12 hours a day. As his competition improved and the game itself started to feel a bit tedious, his interest in Starcraft began to fade. Filling the void was poker, which many of his gaming buddies had started to play online after Chris Moneymaker’s victory in the 2003 World Series. Unsurprisingly, these computer junkies congregated more often online than they did at the local casino.

“There was a big community of Starcraft players on Liquid Poker,” said ElkY. “We started at that site, and we all learned from each other. It was a familiar world.”

His poker career began innocently enough. In 2004, a friend transferred $20 into his PokerStars account, and Grospellier promptly lost it. But the hook had been set. He had found a new challenge, one to replace his waning obsession with Starcraft, and he threw himself into it with all he had.

For the first six months of his new career, Grospellier concentrated on cash games, playing as many as 14 tables at a time. He did well enough to convince PokerStars to enter him in a few live tournaments. His first big one, the Main Event of the 2005 WSOP, “didn’t go so well” for him. He busted early on. But he continued to work on his game, looking for new challenges every time he sat down at the tables. One that inspired him the most was attaining “Supernova” and “Supernova Elite” status on PokerStars, which he did by earning 100,000 frequent player points in just two weeks and 1,000,000 FPPs in 4½ months. Why was it so important to him?

“It was just the competition. I wanted to be the first one to do it. It was really hard because some of the other players who were trying to do it were not playing live tournaments at all, and I was already playing live tournaments through PokerStars. I couldn’t play as much as I wanted online, but I still managed to do it.”

During this period, his bankroll and his health both took precipitous nosedives. He nearly went broke and he weighed as much as 210 pounds at one point, but in the end the effort paid him great dividends as PokerStars made him one of its fully sponsored pros in 2006. From that point forward his results in live tournaments began to rapidly improve. He cashed in a WSOP event as well as an EPT event in Baden that year, and he started off 2007 with a bang. In January, he outlasted 398 other players in the Scandinavian Open to get heads-up with Magnus Petterson for the title.

“I was chip leader going into heads-up,” Grospellier recalled, “and I was pushing him to see if he could come back from it. I really thought I was going to win.”

And if the poker gods weren’t so fickle he would have. In the decisive hand of the match, ElkY, holding A-2, made trip deuces on the turn. He was one card away from winning the championship until Petterson, dealt pocket threes, made a full house when a three fell on the river.

Devastated, Grospellier lost the match just a few hands later.

Some players would have never recovered from such a cruel beat, but ElkY was determined to reach the same level in poker he had attained in Starcraft. He hired a nutritionist and won a proposition bet that paid him $75,000 for shedding 50 pounds in three months. Getting in shape had an immediate impact on his tournament results. Making final tables nearly became a habit. In a six-month period he made three: one at the 2007 WSOP, another in an APPT event in Macau, and one more in the main event of the 2008 EPT PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.

The last was particularly noteworthy as the field was not only huge (1,136) but also hugely talented. He started the final day second in chips, nearly $4-million behind chip leader David “The Dragon” Pham, but before long Grospellier and Pham had switched places on the leaderboard. Finally, with four players left, the two got involved in a hand that Grospellier believes was the most important of the tournament for him.

“I had a gutshot straight draw and a flush draw against David Pham when there were four players left. It was really a turning point because I knew David Pham was the most experienced player at the table, and I knew I had a chance to bust him. Even if I lost that hand, I had more chips than him.”

ElkY caught a diamond on the river to eliminate Pham and went on to win the tournament, the first major title of his career, as well as $2-million. That victory kicked off one of the greatest runs in the history of tournament poker. After cashing twice at the 2008 WSOP, including a deep run in the Main Event, he steamrolled a field full of pros at the $15,000 WPT Festa al Lago Classic in October to win $1.4-million. In this case there’s no need to recap critical hands. With two tables remaining, Grospellier captured the lead and he never relinquished it, playing nearly flawless poker all the way to the end.

“I played that tournament like I never had before. It was the best poker I have played in my entire life. I was always making the right move and the right decisions.”

Many top players go years in between major victories, but he had scored two in less than 10 months. In the blink of an eye he had gone from being a mere online sensation to a bona fide superstar. Having already achieved that status in Korea, the role came naturally to him. He bleached his hair white. He embraced high fashion. He moved to London to be closer to the action. And he shined brightest on the biggest stages, winning the $24,500 High Roller event at the 2009 PCA and making the semifinals of the 2009 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship.

In the latter event he knocked out four opponents even though it was his first year to play in the tournament and he wasn’t used to the format. “The matches are so quick. You don’t have much time to figure out your opponents, so it was kind of hard. But it was also a lot of fun to play. I hope to play again this year.”

After besting qualifier Fred Collins, Ilari Sahamies, John Juanda (whom ElkY called his toughest opponent), and Phil Hellmuth, he squared off against Vanessa Rousso in the semifinals. “The match against Vanessa Rousso was really tough because I had a big chip lead, but then I lost a hand where she had kings. She doubled up, then I took the chip lead again and moved in with J-10 suited and she called me with A-K and I lost that one as well. It was disappointing because two times I was one card away from winning, but she played really well so I can’t complain.”

A month later, Grospellier finished third in the 2009 WPT Championship, and he might very well have won it all if his A-J had held up against Christian Harder’s A-8 and Ran Azor’s A-7. Then to cap off his amazing run, he won two events at the 2009 World Championship of Online Poker. In less than two years, from January 2008 to September 2009, he had won a WPT title, an EPT title, two WCOOP titles, and $5.8-million. It was a display of dominance rarely seen in tournament poker.

As masterful as ElkY has been, his resume still contains one glaring omission. To join Gavin Griffin and Roland de Wolfe as the only players to complete poker’s vaunted “Triple Crown,” Grospellier needs to win a WSOP bracelet. While he’s cashed nine times in WSOP events, the closest he’s gotten to winning a bracelet was his ninth-place finish in a $2,500 No-Limit Hold ’Em event in 2007. He is undoubtedly one of the best No-Limit Hold ’Em tournament players on the planet, but until he starts winning bracelets he’s going to have a hard time convincing anyone that he’s better than the man who’s won 11, Phil Hellmuth.

Even more so than Hellmuth, who plays other games but hasn’t yet won a bracelet in any of them, Grospellier is very much a No-Limit Hold ’Em tournament specialist. “I don’t play many other games,” he admitted. “I play a little Pot-Limit Omaha, but I find it a bit too boring so I don’t really play that much. I guess I should start playing other games, but there are so many No-Limit Hold ’Em tournaments there’s really no need to learn other games.”

If he can maintain his focus and continue to play at the same high level he’s achieved the past few years, Grospellier might one day zoom past Daniel Negreanu on the all-time tournament money list unless some other fixation happens to steal his attention. An obvious one looms on the horizon. Starcraft II: Wings Of Liberty, the long-awaited sequel to the original Starcraft, is being released this spring. Might he be tempted to quit poker in order to concentrate on the game that captured his attention for so long?

ElkY laughed off the suggestion. “It’s too hard now. I am way behind.”