University of Waterloo student Steve Paul-Ambrose, 22, must feel like he’s died and went to Poker heaven. After a fun week of playing poker at the Atlantis Casino Resort on Paradise Island, Paul-Ambrose has emerged a big winner. He was playing, with a pool of over 700 players, in the Third Annual PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. The third-year business student rolled his experience up into a bankroll of $1.3 million—but that’s not all.

In case life was not good enough for Paul-Ambrose, he also won a $25,000 US seat in the World Poker Tour’s championship tournament, which is being played in Vegas in April 2006. The PokerStars tournament has a buy-in of $8,000, but Ambrose only had to fork over a cool $102 to get in, because he won a series of tournaments at PokerStars.

According to George Ambrose, his brother, he has very little experience and has almost never faced real live poker players at a table. Steve Paul-Ambrose had been playing just about two years when he struck gold. This is quite a long way from playing penny poker with his uncles. His head-to-head showdown on the final table against Brook Lyter, a thirty-four year old entrepreneur from North Dakota, lasted thirty-minutes.

Look for this match-up sometime next season on the Travel channel.