Tournament Poker Pro Shane Schelger and PokerStars Part Ways

Shane “shaniac” Schleger, a high-stakes professional poker player at PokerStars, has parted ways with the company. He had become a sponsored pro at PokerStars back in February 2011. A resident of California, Schleger had said that additional income could either make or break a professional poker tournament player.

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Schleger has been representing PokerStars for the past three years, but now he is no longer a member of Team PokerStars Pro. The 36-year-old professional poker player said that it has been both a pleasure and a privilege to be with PokerStars. Expressing his appreciation of PokerStars, Schleger said: “Not only has Stars met its obligation to its players at every turn, it has always felt like a real place within a virtual world: a place where I saw large sums of money won and lost, but far more memorably, a place where personalities were built, lifelong relationships were fostered, and community thrives.”

In the course of his career, Schleger has earned as much as $1,189,042 in live poker tournaments and $4,147,862 in online poker tournaments. However, his life as a sponsored pro at PokerStars was far from smooth, especially after Black Friday, the day on which the feds cracked down on PokerStars and forced it to withdraw from the US. The event forced Schelger to leave the US and settle down in Mexico.

The year 2013 was the toughest for Schleger, who said that he found it very difficult to win at poker while struggling to maintain a romance in South California and a full-time high-stakes poker gaming career online. During the WSOP season, he got married in Las Vegas and decided to move back to California. However, before heading back to California, he tried to plump his bankroll playing poker. He said: “Whether I was running bad or the game had passed me by … I knew I had to conjure up whatever remaining heart and energy and poker smarts I had left and pour them into the 2013 WCOOP.”

Fortunately for Schleger, he did manage to win some poker money. He took part in the 66th event of the PokerStars WCOOP, which happened to be the $5,200 buy-in No Limit Hold’em Main Event and finished sixth. He won a large six-figure prize of $291,154 for his effort. This prize also happened to be the biggest he had won in the course of his nine-year-long career of playing poker tournaments.

PokerStars has wished Schleger all the best.