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A member of the notorious new breed of young poker pros who are winning—and ...
.Marafioti is 23 years old. Toronto is his home base, but he spends a lot of his time playing tournaments in Vegas and Europe. He is one of the more notorious figures in this new generation of poker stars, young guns who honed their games not in barrooms but online. Players who have, for better or worse, completely revolutionized the pace and structure of the game and who have made extraordinary sums of money doing so. Marafioti is a provocative presence in both online and real-life games, renowned for his high-rolling lifestyle, brash play and mouthiness. In his four-year poker-playing career he’s made more than $5 million. While 37-year-old Daniel Negreanu, the most famous player ever to come out of Canada, has reportedly made at least five times as much, Marafioti, in his way, is more integral to the continued success of the poker industry. Poker’s history is rich with charismatic characters—the steely-eyed saloon gambler, the suave Monte Carlo millionaire—but Marafioti embodies a different archetype: the poker genius who first struck gold with a laptop. The Epic Poker League now ranks him the 19th best live player in the world.
Only three hours into the EPL tourney, however, an increasingly glum Marafioti wasn’t feeling like a prodigy. He was the short stack at his table, and after being dealt a pair of jacks, he moved all of his chips in before the flop (the first three community cards dealt to all players). He was called by another player with pocket jacks, and they split the pot. Marafioti took out his earbuds—he’d been listening to what he described as “electronic-techno-house”—and put on a pair of Bulgari prescription eyeglasses. He’s a stocky guy, about five-foot-seven, and has the physique of someone who spends 10 hours a day sitting at a table or in front of a computer: a premature, sedentary softness that he tries to keep in check through frequent gym sessions. That week he was sporting a chinstrap beard that gave him the appearance of an Amish club kid. During a break in the tournament, he told me he was “still having fun,” but the look on his face, something like dazed exasperation, suggested his idea of fun involved more pain than most people’s.
