Matthew Hunt is a 26-year-old professional poker player from Southampton in the UK. Known as theginger45 on most sites, he started playing poker in home games while studying French at University, and began playing online in low-stakes cash games and SNGs to help fund his Masters degree in Transnational Studies. After several years working and volunteering in fields as diverse as journalism, language teaching and charity work across six different countries, he decided to give professional poker a go in 2012 as an MTT player. After battling variance and working on his game for the best part of a year, he made his breakthrough score in November 2012, winning the PokerStars Big $109 for just over $20,000. From there, the scores came thick and fast – he has final tabled some of the biggest daily and weekly events online, including the PokerStars Big $162, the 888 Sunday Mega Deep, and the Party Poker Sunday Major, which he won for $42,000 in June 2013, and came 8th in SCOOP event #8-M in 2013. He also won the Full Tilt MiniFTOPS leaderboard in April 2013 with the highest-ever individual leaderboard score for a single series, notching victories in both the NL Irish and HORSE events, with other finishes in 2nd, 9th, 11th and 34th across several different games, despite his inexperience in mixed game formats. To date, he has over $750,000 of online MTT cashes, and is ranked 120th worldwide and 10th in the UK on PocketFives. He also writes and blogs in the TwoPlusTwo Poker Goals and Challenges forum, where his two yearly blog threads have been viewed over 150,000 times.
