Player Update: PearlJammer

One of online tournament poker’s original crushers made a stunning comeback in the PokerStars SCOOP series this month.

Jon ‘PearlJammer’ Turner, who has been dominating the MTT scene since back in 2006, made an incredible 12 cashes in the Spring series, the most impressive coming in the $10,300 buy-in Main Event. With a staggering $5m in guaranteed prize money up for grabs, Turner carefully navigated his way through the 502 runner field to eventually finish 3rd for an eye-watering prize of $527,100. And this was no standard tournament field, with the likes of Chris Moorman, Thayer Rasmussen, ‘tjbentham’, Mike ‘SirWatts’ Watson, Ylon Schwartz & ‘Traumatize’ all making the 54 man cash list.

It capped a remarkable couple of weeks for Turner, of Henderson, Nevada, who made total series cashes of over $582,000 – only 3 players in the world made more money than him in the SCOOP. He also came agonisingly close to taking down the Stud Hi/Lo bracelet in Event #12 but winded up finishing 2nd for $39,220.

‘PearlJammer’ is a former Pocket Fives triple crown winner and has also taken down the PokerStars Super Tuesday, Wednesday Hundred Fifty Grand and Nightly Hundred Grand in his time but hasn’t been seen putting in serious volume on the virtual felt in recent months. He was widely praised for his chapter in the 2008 book ‘Winning poker tournaments one hand at a time’, co-written with Jon ‘ApeStyles’ van Fleet and Eric ‘Rizen’ Lynch, where the reader gets an insight into the mind of one of the finest exponents of tight-aggressive tournament poker. He has also been taking increasingly to the live game, and since the 2008 World Series has cashed in the Caesars Palace Classic Heads-Up event (16th, $2,483), the Doyle Brunson Classic $3,000 tournament (7th, $17,045) and the WPT $15,000 Brunson Main Event (73rd, $21,620). In January ’09 he also signed a sponsorship deal with Full Tilt so look out for him playing under his own name on the tables there – after his SCOOP exploits, hopefully we will see the return of ‘PearlJammer’ to the high stakes MTTs for a long time to come.