Erik Cajelais

Montréal's own Erik Cajelais looks more like a feature from Miami Ink or one of Vin Diesel's on-screen henchmen than a professional poker player. Contrasting with the stereotypical image of new-age players where all parts of the body are covered by sunglasses, scarves and hoodies, Cajelais sports a shaved head and heavily-tattooed, burly arms. He plays poker according to the motto inked across his forearms – 'live hard' – always fighting tooth and nail for the tournament win. He's proved himself more than able to get the job done on a number of occasions – the most notable of these wins was in 2006 when he took down a major WPT title to scoop $430,730 in cash. The victory came in the $5,000 No Limit Hold'em event and Erik got past a strong line-up including Justin Bonomo, Erik Seidel and Ben Lamb.

Along with this WPT title, Cajelais also has captured a WSOPE bracelet – this time in an Omaha event. The win came in 2009 at the £2,500 Pot Limit Omaha tournament in London and proved that he certainly could 'live hard' at the poker table – mastering the four-card Omaha is definitely not an easy accomplishment.

Interestingly, Erik's two largest cashes have actually come in events where he finished as a runner-up. The smaller of the two came at the 2007 WSOP in the $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha event, where he took home $483,755, got past the late Dave 'Devilfish' Ulliott but ultimately fell just short of the bracelet. In his biggest score to date, Erik proved his ability once more to hang with the best of them by finishing second in the 2009 EPT £20,000 No Limit Hold'em High Roller event for a healthy sum of $518,976. With Finland's tricky Illari Sahamies and #1 Ukrainian player Eugene Katchalov finishing behind Cajelais, the Canadian was clearly not deterred by the tough competition or large cost of the buy-in.

With 19 WSOP cashes along with four WSOP final table finishes and the same number for WPT events, Erik's cashes today exceed $3,300,000.