The player

Name: Roland de Wolfe

Resides: London, Las Vegas

Style of play: Hyper-aggressive

Tournament winnings: $2,918,972

Biggest win: 2006 Bellagio Five-Star World Poker Classic – $25,000 WPT Championship event, no-limit Hold’em; 3rd, $1,025,205

Careful readers will have recognised Roland de Wolfe’s name long before he became the most hailed poker player in Europe. And that is part of what’s so extraordinary about de Wolfe’s meteoric rise through the high stakes tournament universe. A little more than three years ago he was a decent poker player, with lots of game, and a job at what was then a newly-launched gambling magazine called InsideEdge (our sister title, now InsidePoker).

Fresh from university, in Birmingham, London-bred de Wolfe was half-assed about what he wanted to do with his future – ‘Writing seemed to be the only thing I was good at,’ he says with a shrug – and got hired to write about poker, a game that was just beginning to take off in a big way.