Rocco Palumbo

Italian tournament pro Rocco Palumbo is an entertaining and highly accomplished figure in poker. His most revered achievement was in 2012 when he won his first WSOP bracelet by taking down the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event for a massive $464,464. Amongst the field was Main Event winner Joe Cada and soon-to-be Swedish champ Martin Jacobson, yet the presence of these competitors did not deter Palumbo from triumphing over them.

Rocco had an equally impressive 2013 as he earned himself another major title – this time at the €3,000 No Limit Hold’em WPT Grand Prix event in Venice. This second big win in his live career was made sweeter by the fact that it took place on home soil whilst simultaneously making him the first Italian to win both WSOP and WPT trophies. He made it to the final nine of another WPT event just a couple of months later – the biggest one on the schedule, in fact. At the $25,000 World Championship event in Las Vegas, there was a seven-figure prize up for grabs with a final table that included the likes of Daniel Negreanu and David Peters. Unfortunately for Palumbo, he ended up making an early exit in eighth but still managed to pocket a six-figure score for the deep run.

Though all of these results might not suggest it, Rocco actually invests most of his time playing online. The former accountant admits that he prefers the ease and flexibility that playing online offers him, though he was still forced to relocate as a result of it when his home country of Italy made legal changes that affected online player pools. Moving to Slovenia around 2012 so that he could continue to grind online, Palumbo has put together a list of results that exceeds $4,500,000 across PokerStars (now as ‘sephirot88’ and originally as ‘RoccoGe’), FullTilt (‘RoccoPa’) and 888 (‘sephir0t’). In 2016, he reached an all-time high of sixth on the PocketFives tournament leaderboard after a series of impressive cashes that included a $222,750 score after finishing runner-up in the SCOOP-24-M $2,100 NLH 8-Max event. The Italian has won SCOOP, TCOOP and FTOPS titles for himself and is rightfully regarded by many as one of the strongest online tournament players to ever come out of Italy.