A soon to be famous Gulf Coast Poker player, who should already be famous, a guy who’s recent results make most known pros results look mediocre, is astoundingly almost an unknown to most of the poker world. This despite a recent cover on Cardplayer magazine, and several huge live tournament finishes. Perhaps because he’s so quiet and unassuming at the table Jason Mercier has some how flown under the radar while having one an epic heater.
Mercier swore in his Cardplayer feature that once you get to know him the hard part is to get him to shut up, even if it is table presence hints at the opposite. Same may be true of his tournament poker career, once he won his first one it may be impossible to shut him out of another. His most recent live tournament score, just another in his collection, came when he won the 2,500 pound No Limit Texas Hold’em event at the 2009 EPT London. He earned just over 115k pounds which is roughly 185k dollars.
That recent victory in at the EPT London gives the young man from Florida over $3.9 million dollars in total lifetime live tournament cashes. You’d think Mercier with his French sounding name and so many scores in Europe was a Euro but he’s not.
In 2008, Mercier announced himself to the world by winning the European Poker Tour San Remo main event. Nice seed money for the start of a successful live career. Yeah, it was for a paltry 1.37 million dollars. Mercier didn’t stop there. He managed to go deep enough to cash a couple of times in the 2008 World Series of Poker but his signature results were still on European soil.
So it was no surprise when Mercier went back to Europe to play in another EPT event and to hit it big again. At the EPT Barcelona, Mercier didn’t quite win the main event, but still managed a sixth place finish. That was another 300k+ to his bankroll. People in Europe started paying attention even if the folks in the U.S. hadn’t caught on.