Patrick Leonard is nothing if not determined. Having grown tired of his friends stuffing him in their weekly £10 buy-in Friday night poker game, Patrick began studying the game and by the time he’d graduated from the University of Sheffield he was ready to go pro. As Patrick himself says, “Poker is a kind of world where you have to be completely immersed in it if you want to be successful”. It took just 18 months for the Geordie to be ranked world number one on PocketFives.

To date Patrick has amassed more than $2.5 million in cashes, almost half of which was won during a five-day Las Vegas heater in July 2017. The Englishman outlasted super-tough fields and took down three separate high-stakes tournaments, pocketing over $350K in each event.

Interestingly, Patrick says he no longer pays attention to his poker ranking and will instead be focusing on much more important matters…like cooking dinner for the first time in nine years!

Scroll down for our Q&A with Patrick or to check out his poker stats click here.

What has been your toughest game/tournament?

I enjoy playing against the best players in the world and usually, when we play $50,000 or $25,000 buy-ins, the field has no qualifiers so everybody’s either good enough to buy in themselves or has somebody who believes they are one of the best in the world. I really enjoy them. They are small, intimate and intense fields.

Do you prefer live or online games?

Definitely online. In 90% of tournaments you’re going to run bad and bust out. That means if you play live once a week you are likely to only not run bad one weekend every few months. Online you can just register for the next tournament.

What would you say the highlight of your poker career has been?

Getting to number 1 in the world for the very first time. I hadn’t established myself previously and did so without any huge breakout scores. Usually people get a lot of points from a big event but I just had a lot of consistent $50k-100k scores.

What else are you known for?

I’m known for loving the game. Everybody knows I’ve immersed myself in it over the last 8 years and consumed a lot of content in my latter years.

If you could play a game of poker with anyone, who would it be?

Probably somebody really bad who wanted to play for really high stakes. Rob Yong maybe?

Do you have a favourite poker quote?

“You can’t win if you fold.”