WSOP Main Event: Niclas Lundqvist

Although he only started playing poker three years ago, Niclas Lundqvist, 34, from Stockholm is already made a pretty good living from it - not so much from winning at cards (although he's no slouch at the tables) but from the poker consultancy he has set up running poker events for businesses.

Niclas sussed out early on that many of the skills you need in order to be good at poker are also highly useful in business life - negotiating, reading your opponents and so forth. Scandinavian companies naturally jumped at the chance to include poker as part of their staff development strategies (hey, who wouldn't!) and now www.pokerevent.se is running up to five events a day.

The father-of-one (he and his wife expect their second child at Christmas) qualified for this year's WSOP in a PS $160 double shoot out. He also qualified on PS for last season's EPT in Barcelona but after ten hours' hard grafting experienced a horrible bad beat involving Q9 which he still finds hard to talk about.

Update:Niclas lasted seven hours into the WSOP but took a fatal hit when his set of 3s were trounced by a lucky straight.