Thomas Keller AKA “Thunder” did not start his card playing career like most. He actually started his card playing career as a “Magic: The Gathering” player. Like David Williams, Keller used to be a regular Magic tournament player. He says that both Magic and poker are similar due to having to know your outs, odds, and you must be able to bluff. He said that at one point he considered becoming a professional Magic player, but then his attention was diverted to poker.

His poker career started in college. He went home over Christmas break from Stanford University and started playing a home game with his buddies. They would play for quarter and at the end of the night, he was up $50 to $100. He said, “If I’m playing this small and still making money, maybe I could do this seriously.”

So Keller started playing at larger stakes, mostly at $3-$6 online and in casinos. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in Economics, he moved to Arizona and started moving up in limits. He won so much money at one casino that he had every $100 chip for the casino in the trunk of his car. He actually had to sell the chips to high stakes players in order for them to play.

Keller hit the poker tournament scene in 2003 with a 3rd place finish at the California State Poker Championships. This won him $36,395. Six months later, Keller outlasted a heads-up duel with Allen Cunningham to win a WPT preliminary event at the Bellagio Five Diamond. This won him $281,525. Keller’s greatest poker accomplishment came in the 2004 World Series of Poker. He came out on top of a 254 player field to win the $5,000 NL Holdem event for $382.020. At the time Keller was the youngest bracelet winner in history.

Keller was a much heavier man when he won the bracelet at the World Series of Poker. He decided in 2005 that in order to have the stamina that one needs to last in professional poker tournament, he needed to lose weight. As a result, Keller had Gastric Bypass surgery. He lost over 120 pounds with his surgery and is now slim and trim for the long sessions in tournaments.

Keller claims that he plays televised poker tournaments nowadays for exposure and that it is less about the money. Keller was not much of a force in tournament poker for quite a while. From 2005 to 2007, Keller only had one in the money finish which was a final table at the World Poker Classic in 2005. It wasn’t until this past World Series of Poker that he has begun to reemerge as a force in poker. He cashed twice during the WSOP, including a 61st place finish in the Main Event for $115,800.

Now that Keller is healthy and back on track, perhaps we will see more of the aggression and skill that propelled him to become one of the youngest WSOP Champions in history. It may be only a matter of time before the “Thunder” rolls