Jonathan "PearlJammed" Turner

It may seem as if he has been around the game for more than the last decade, but Jonathan Turner has only been a part of the professional world of poker for a short time. In those few short years, Turner has been tagged as one of the next great wave of poker players from the internet era.

Born in 1982, Jon was able to figure out the business side of life at a very early age. “My business sense took root when I sold sports cards at trade shows, flea markets and online from when I was sixteen to eighteen,” Jon states on his Facebook page. “I then went to college in 2000 and, after a five year battle, was able to get my degree in Computer Sciences from North Carolina State University in 2005.”

While attending NCSU, Turner would find another outlet for his business sense and his mathematical mind. “I discovered poker in 2003 and found a new, very profitable passion!” he remembers on Facebook. Indeed, the cash games that he played around Raleigh, North Carolina and the freerolls online that he took part in convinced him that he should give playing poker for a living a shot. Following his graduation from college, Jon headed for the bright lights of Las Vegas and has never looked back.

Where most of the poker playing community knows Jon from is from his lengthy list of exploits in the online poker arena. Playing under the name “PearlJammer” or “PearlJammed” on a host of online poker sites, Turner has made huge amounts of money from online tournament poker. Although it probably wasn’t his first online cash, the earliest recorded effort for Jon dates back to July 2006 when, in a $109 NLHE event on PartyPoker, he finished in 38^th place for a cash out of $336.

Since then, Turner’s exploits in the online tournament poker world have been too numerous to mention, but here are a few highlights. In 2009, Jon would finish in third place in the PokerStars Spring Championships of Online Poker (SCOOP) Main Event, taking down his biggest online cash of $527,100. There are a host of daily guaranteed events that Turner has won as well, pushing his career online tournament poker earnings up to a gaudy $4,446,704.

The reason for moving to Las Vegas, however, wasn’t to ensconce himself in his house and play poker online. Jon would venture into the live tournament poker world almost immediately upon his arrival in Sin City. At the 2005 World Series of Poker, Turner would have an immediate impact on the live tournament poker community. He would make his first live cash in the $3000 NLHE event that year, finishing in eighteenth place for a payday of $19,515.

After that WSOP cash, Jon would add six more tournament cashes across several of the most popular casinos in Las Vegas. Instead of being overwhelmed by the immediate success, Turner would continue to display his ever-growing poker skills between 2006 and 2011. His results are stunning in that time frame; he has 36 cashes in those five years (and counting), with sixteen of those cashes in WSOP tournaments and four of them coming on the World Poker Tour stage.

Although he has not won a major title in the live tournament world to date, Jon has displayed great maturity and business acumen by earning his way into high buy in tournaments through satellites rather than paying the full price. Three of his four career wins have been to earn seats in major tournaments (his only outright win was in a $1000 PLO tournament at the Wynn Classic in 2009 for $56,017). Turner’s largest live tournament cash was at this year’s WSOP, when he finished in third place for a $274,005 score in a $1000 NLHE event. His career record of 24 final tables and 47 cashes have earned Jon $1,265,054 in live tournament earnings; with his online success added into the mix, Turner has over $5.7 million in tournament earnings since 2005.

In addition to his exploits on the green baize, Jon has passed along his wealth of poker knowledge to those that would wish to emulate him. He wrote the book “Winning Poker Tournaments:  One Hand At A Time” with his good friends Eric “Rizen” Lynch and John “Apestyles” Van Fleet in 2008 and followed with a second volume of the book in 2010. He also teaches poker through the online training site PokerVT.