It's not easy to win a poker tournament. Getting that outright first-place mark on Hendon Mob can elude the most skilled players for frustratingly long periods. Yet, in the growing niche poker market of the greater Maryland area, Justin Arnwine has amassed a staggering number of victories in a short period of time.
Take a minute to check out his profile on The Hendon Mob, sort by position, and scroll. At the time of writing, Arnwine had over 140 first-place marks on his career earnings list.
The first-place finishes don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, and it’s worth noting that Arnwine was back in the winner's circle just one day after we spoke with him here at the Potomac Winter Poker Open at MGM National Harbor, where he took down first place for $23,365 in Event #3 — a single-day $500 event.
No one closes out a tournament like Justin Arnwine. Few players from that area don’t know Arnwine. You’ll almost always see him draped in his signature Hello Kitty attire with an attitude that seems to always start light-hearted chatter at the table. He has the ability to build stacks, uses exploits with success, and can be a menace when given the opportunity to apply pressure to his opponents.
Ask the Org: What region of the United States has the best poker players?
A different kind of card game
Arnwine didn’t find poker till a bit later in life. “I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh around 2003 and started with locals, moved to regionals around 2004, and I think my first Shonen Jump was around 2006.” Shonen Jumps are what Arnwine says are the Yu-Gi-Oh version of the World Poker Tour, but unfortunately, they have much smaller prize pools.
He said he vividly remembers a chance viewing of an old WPT stream that may have influenced the course of his life. “We drove home, and I turned on the Travel Channel, and Carlos Mortenson was winning a WPT for like four million dollars. I had just beaten 550 people in Shonen Jump Charlotte, and he beat around the same in his WPT, and I realized I was playing the wrong game.”
From cash to tournaments
Arnwine self-identified as a bit of a degen when it came to the number of hours played in his early career in the cash streets. “I used to play over two days straight, fifty-hour sessions,” he told us, but the tournament life became attractive when he realized the return on the same number of hours. “The process became whenever I had a bad two weeks in cash, I would go to the weekend tournament and try to recoup, and that was basically my experience with tournaments for the next three years.”
He says the transition into full-time tournament pro was gradual, but “Sometime around COVID,” he really hit the gas pedal, and support from his wife Caitlyn was a driving factor as well. She saw tournament success for the first time in February 2023 at the Potomac Winter Poker Open at MGM National Harbor where she finished second for her first major score. The pair has been seen playing alongside each other in events ever since.
Caitlyn and Justin are a regular fixture on the East Coast tournament scene. Arnwine has over a million dollars in career earnings — but it's mostly comprised of four-figure scores. He prides himself on keeping 100% of his own action. “I bankroll myself. I don’t have any backers,” he said, “I hear about well-known players and that they made X-amount of millions, and there is a certain amount of pride knowing that what's on my Hendon Mob is real. I had all of it.”
“I want to play as high as I can, while still having one hundred percent of my own action.”
Photos courtesy of Danny Maxwell
