Bryan Piccioli is a young American poker player who has seen success both online and in live tournaments. His internet poker exploits have certainly been more lucrative, but Piccioli is only in his early twenties and appears to have a long way to go before reaching his full potential.
Since 2007, Bryan’s incontestable skills on the felt have syphoned just over $205,000 into his personal bankroll. This figure envelops Piccioli’s 16 live tournament cashes, the largest of which include a $28,000 77th place finish in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Season 7 Main Event on January 5th, 2010, a 70th place cash worth $35,863 on April 30, 2010 at the EPT Monte Carlo Championship, and his 19th place exit from the World Poker Final Main Event of WPT Season 9 for $33,016 on October 18, 2010.
One thing that each of Piccioli’s most prosperous live tournament cashes have in common is that they all took place in 2010 – indisputably the shining year of his live poker career thus far. However, if we look beyond the dollar signs, we find that he has also achieved a 1st place cash in a NLH Turbo Bounty event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in January 2011 for $19,730, as well as two 3rd place cashes and five other final table appearances.
Bryan Piccioli may not sound all that impressive for someone who has been playing poker since 2004, but we’ve only scratched the surface. It is his online poker moniker, “theczar19” that gained him the most fame as a true pro poker player.
In a three month period of time (Oct 30, 2011 – Jan 29, 2012), Bryan “theczar19” Piccioli has cashed in a phenomenal 240 online poker tournaments. That’s an average of 2.6 cashes per day, placing anywhere from 1st to 2,395th. When a player places 2,395th and still walks away with 3x the buy-in as winnings, you can just imagine how many players he was up against to get that far. Even more astonishing, 56 of those 240 cashes came over the course of just 3 days, bringing in more than $44k in winnings. Suffice it to say, Bryan Piccioli is the epitome of an online poker grinder.
Though “theczar19” racked up an exorbitant amount of wins at online poker tournaments, it is his largest cash draws that have begun striking fear into the heart of his opponents. Bryan saw one of his earliest extraordinary achievements in October of 2008 when he whittled his way into 2nd at a PokerStars Wednesday Quarter Million tournament that awarded him $35,600. It would take two years and another 2nd place finish to best that profitable experience, bringing home $51,606 in in a $200k GTD at Full Tilt Poker in September 2010.
It was somewhere between the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 that something appeared to have triggered inside of Bryan Piccioli. Maybe it was his largest online tournament cash to date in February of 2011 – 2nd place in a major FTOPS event worth $288,008 – that made him realize how superior his online poker prowess was to its live counterpart. Whatever the case, his online tournament success picked up inexorable momentum, and his live poker victories noticeably plummeted. It was no skin off the young American’s hide as he finished the year with three more of his largest online cashes to date, $52k, $59k and $66k.
After spending so many years of his life in the comfort of his home town of Allegany, NY, Bryan faced what was likely one of the hardest decisions of his life when the infamous Black Friday — the closing of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and several more of the largest US-facing poker site by the US government—set in. It didn’t take long for Piccioli to choose his career over his love for New York. He picked up and moved to Cabo San Lucas where he continues to grind away, day in and day out, at the online poker tables.