ANDREW BRENNAN has just won £44,750 on a game of cards. He came fifth. “For a couple of hours I was really annoyed with myself for getting knocked out. Then I realised it was quite a lot of money,” he says.

Mentioned in passing in last week’s column, Andrew is a poker professional, a king – ace, maybe – in the game’s remarkable resurgence that began when the aptly named Chris Moneymaker won $8m in the 2003 World Series in Las Vegas having paid just $40 to enter online. Last week was the English Poker Open, in Mayfair. The winner got £250,000.

Andrew’s a Shildon lad, 27 and single, a headteacher’s son who read computer technology at Northumbria University and learned an awful lot about poker after first playing with friends.

The resultant third-class degree, he says, wasn’t “entirely” due to poker. “I probably was slightly obsessive but it was a long time ago. It was just the rush of doing well at something. Now it’s a sensible option that gives me some income.”

For a year he ran his own IT firm, then played poker full-time for three years – almost always on-line – but now works part-time for the Shildonbased Town Crier newspapers.

It’s there that we chat over a mug of tea. If there are any cards about, it must be someone’s birthday.

“I contend that I have two jobs,”

Andrew insists. “Playing poker isn’t a hobby.”

Since it’s work, it’s working all hours. Much online poker is played after midnight. “People have a few beers, come home from the pub and don’t mind losing a few quid.

“It sounds ruthless, but it’s my job. I can play eight hands simultaneously online, more than I could in a year in a weekly tournament.”

It helps, he says, to be “mathematically sound” without the need for mathematical genius. The luck factor, he guesses – “argued to death over the Internet” – is perhaps 35 per cent; the skill isn’t so much the poker face as the icecool temperament.

It’s what they call tilt control. “Tilt means becoming angry or emotionally involved. You have to accept that you’re going to lose sometimes.”

The best players, he believes, are between 22 and 26 – “it’s when their brains are sharper.” He himself would love to retire at 30, reckons that there’s no chance of it.

“My dad’s all right about what I do, my mum’s not too great.

There’s a general perception that it’s gambling and it’s degenerate and that one day I’ll get a grip. I like to think I’m proving that I am.”