partypoker Qualifier Stephen Caplan: "This Week, It's Going to Be Different"

Stephen Caplan is one of the friendly faces we often run across here at the Playground Poker Club, and more often than not he’s wearing a patch because he qualified online thru partypoker.

This is the seventh time that Caplan has earned his entry thru partypoker into a WPT event, with five of them coming here at Playground Poker Club. (Caplan has also won two packages to play in the WPT500 @ Aria in Las Vegas.) When Playground Poker Club ran their November series a year and a half ago, Caplan wasn’t able to win his seat in an online satellite, but he bubbled the event to earn several thousand dollars in cash, so he used that money to come over to Playground and enter some preliminary events on his own.

Caplan isn’t a professional poker player, but he makes enough money with poker that he doesn’t need to work full-time — he’s self-employed, and worked 177 days last year to keep his schedule open and flexible.

Caplan is from Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and he is long-time friends with poker’s most famous player from Guelph, Season IV WPT Player of the Year Gavin Smith. Caplan used to own a taxicab, and Smith drove for him back before the televised poker boom.

While this is Caplan’s fifth time playing a WPT main event here at the Playground Poker Club, he is still looking for his first WPT cash. But he’s feeling good about it this time. “This week, it’s gonna be different.”