Bradenton's RJ Sullivan aiming for WSOP title | Bradenton Herald

He was a baseball player at Manatee High when the poker boom was exploding.

His father already played the game, so, naturally, R.J. Sullivan gravitated toward it.

Bus rides to and from baseball games allowed Sullivan to test his mettle against teammates.

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He found out he was pretty good.

“The competitive edge of the game I was really intrigued about,” said Sullivan, who graduated from Manatee High in 2006. “I did some research, I watched videos and I definitely tried playing online. I really grew a liking to it.”

But it wasn’t until Sullivan took a poker dealing job at the Sarasota Kennel Club that he started to find a niche.

Playing full-time was in the cards.

“The internal struggle after a while was I really can’t do both,” Sullivan said. “So just weighed my options and took a shot.”

That shot has paid off.

Now he’s in Las Vegas for the 48th annual World Series of Poker and is playing several tournaments there ahead of the Main Event, which begins Saturday and comes equipped with a $10,000 buy-in and the chance at poker immortality as the world champion.

Sullivan’s road to becoming a poker professional happened once his old boss, Sam Minutello, gave him the green light to pursue it with the fallback option that his job was always available if it didn’t pan out.

He hasn’t looked back.

Sullivan’s biggest tournament score came at the 2014 WSOP. Playing in Event No. 31, the $1,500 No Limit Hold’em tournament, Sullivan finished second out of 1,631 players.

That performance netted Sullivan more than $258,000.

“That was the first one where it was, ‘This is potentially life-changing if you win this bracelet,’” said Sullivan, who has played in the WSOP the last four years. “Obviously, I came up a little short, but the experience was great. I feel like if that opportunity comes up again, I feel like I’ve been there before so I kind of know what to expect and what not to expect.”

Lately, though, Sullivan opts more for cash games than tournaments.

“The variance is just so hard to control,” Sullivan said. “You can be in a 2,000-player field, and you can beat 1,950 of them, and if you don’t beat those last 50, it’s just not as lucrative as you need it to be. You have to just finish in these tournaments.”

Sullivan said he realized the hourly win rate was higher in cash games, so that’s also what necessitated the change.

However, he’s back grinding the tournament schedule at the WSOP, which started at the end of May and runs until late July with the Main Event concluding.

In recent years, that marquee event broke with the final table of nine players re-convening in November. But that era ended with Card Player reporting in mid-May that the final table will play until a champion is crowned in July.

For Sullivan, he tries to minimize expenses during the WSOP slate by car pooling and having roommates during the series.

He estimates $50,000 is the bankroll required for the tournaments each year.

“Each year I play, I’ve just had more wisdom,” Sullivan said. “More time to get acclimated to the structures, which are so different from any other tournament you’re going to play everywhere else.”

That’s because a majority of tournaments across the country give starting stacks in the 20,000 to 30,000 range, while WSOP events usually give starting stacks of 5,000 units.

“It’s really hard to prepare for that, because there’s really nothing else around the rest of the country at the other times of the year that give you anything close to those types of parameters,” Sullivan said.