One of the 17 PocketFives bracelet winners at the 2012 World Series of Poker (WSOP) was Greg gspot_17Ostrander (pictured), who brought home gold in a $3,000 No Limit Hold’em tournament for nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. Ostrander defeated Aussie poker player Jackie Glazier heads-up, denying the female poker population its second bracelet of the 2012 WSOP. PocketFives sat down with Ostrander, a former model turned corrections officer turned poker player, to talk about his eclectic background and new claim to fame.

PocketFives: Thanks for joining us. Tell us how you’re feeling.

Greg Ostrander: I don’t think it really hit me until I got back home. I had a number of radio stations contact me as well as the local news. I have the first bracelet to come out of the city of Rochester, New York. I probably had 400 text messages and voice mails. It’s just overwhelming the number of people who were paying attention. It’s starting to hit me now. I’m starting to realize the meaning of it now.

PocketFives: Talk about the play of Jackie Glazier.

Greg Ostrander: The final day, I was coming in as a 3:1 underdog. The way play ended the night before, she was in a position to take more and more chips off me. Every time I thought I was making a move, she would come over the top of me and she always had a hand when her chips hit the middle.

On the final day, I came in with a totally different game plan. I knew she’d come in aggressive and knew I’d be able to trap her somehow. I wanted to get back to four million in chips and cut into her lead significantly. People don’t understand that when you play heads-up, your range has to be wide open.

In the hand I’m talking about, I got raised by her and called with 6-2 of clubs. I was looking to hit some type of draw, got lucky, flopped trip sixes, and she had eights. That was the double up and the hand that turned things around for me.

PocketFives: What criticism have you gotten for your 6-2 of clubs hand?

Greg Ostrander: Gavin Smith is one of my good friends and an outspoken pro. He’s never really talked poker with me. We play against each other in cash games and hang out, but we don’t speak about strategy or anything like that.

He criticized me when he was commentating in the live stream. He thought calling there with 6-2 was terrible. I was still at 18 or 19 big blinds and was only calling 250,000 out of a 1.9 million chip stack. I felt comfortable playing a small stack and didn’t even think my stack was short. I ended up out-flopping her. If I don’t hit the flop in that hand, I get away from the hand. You have to get lucky here and there in tournaments. I never had all of my chips behind at any point in the tourney until that point.

PocketFives: What is Gavin Smith (pictured) like away from the poker tables?

Greg Ostrander: If you really tear down to his bones, you finally get to know the real Gavin, who is a very sensible guy. He’s a true friend in the sense that we talk about everything outside of poker like what’s going on in his personal life. You can actually talk to him and he’s an everyday guy. He’s a very good poker player. He keeps a very small circle of friends and I’m glad I’m included in that.

PocketFives: Why wouldn’t you discuss poker with Gavin Smith given how successful he has been?

Greg Ostrander: It’s like when you’re done working, you don’t want to talk with people you’ve worked with all day. With Gavin, I don’t want to be like everyone else and ask him about hands and I don’t think he wants to talk about it either. I want to treat him like a person outside of our profession. I guess I don’t want to talk about things I feel like he doesn’t want to talk about.

PocketFives: We heard you were once an underwear model.

Greg Ostrander: When I was in college, I got hired by a small agency in Buffalo to do a private clothing line. I ended up moving up through the ranks and got hooked up with a photographer who worked for an agency in New York City. The company did shoots for Calvin Klein, for example, and I have done underwear shots.

I don’t want to be labeled as a Calvin Klein model, but it was all through an agency. I did it for about 10 years off and on, but I didn’t do it as much as I could have. The only time I worked like that was on the side when I had days off and would go to New York City.

PocketFives: That’s quite an eclectic background.

Greg Ostrander: I always tell people that I have one of the weirdest resumes there is. I worked for a sheriff’s department inside a jail in the prisoner’s transfer department. I didn’t even know how to play poker when I first started with the sheriff’s department until the last three years on the job. I also have a semi-pro football background for the Rochester Gladiators and Rochester Raiders. We used to travel all over the country.

Losing at poker was financially kicking my butt, so the only way I learned to beat the game was learning how I was losing. You can’t win until you lose first. You don’t really test a person until you put an amount of money at risk that they’re afraid to lose. People don’t understand the different elements there are to poker, so working with a sheriff’s department and learning to read people was helpful. They teach you that stuff in the academy.

It’s important for people to realize that I didn’t quit becoming a cop to start playing poker because I thought it would be financially more rewarding. I was in a situation where an inmate who had been arrested and I had taken to court was about to go to prison and took that opportunity to try ti escape.

We got into a physical altercation where I didn’t have a weapon on me and it was hand-to-hand combat. I got him in a headlock and he had no place to go. He literally bit me in the side of the neck like an animal and, finally, people must have heard the scuffle down the hall because I had to take my thumb and drive it into his eye. We cuffed this guy and when all was said and done, I had a flap of skin hanging by the side of my neck.

I had to go through AIDS testing and we didn’t know what kinds of diseases he had. This was about the second or third time I had to go through all of the testing and it was kind of getting to the point where I was getting sick of my job.

I decided if I didn’t walk away from the job now, in two years I was going to get tenure and would never walk away from it. I just quit after eight years and went looking for a job. I found a ton of jobs, but they were all $30,000 or $40,000 a year, so I said I’d play poker until the right job came along. One year turned into two years and here we are.

View all of our 2012 WSOP bracelet winners.