Whether you’re a millionaire or a pauper, a well-known Las Vegas grinder or an amateur from Iowa, everyone who plays poker has the same goal: win a big tournament and earn yourself more money than you can count.

But the real test is what you do for an encore. If you are like Ciaran O’Leary, and you are a player with a heart, you might give it away – or at least share a portion of it.

O’Leary did just that when he finally made his big score. A 33-year-old Irishman now living in Seattle, O’Leary won the third event at this year’s World Series of Poker, a $1,500 Texas Hold’em tournament. He outlasted 2,997 other players (a record at the time for a non-main event), winning $727,012.

After he won, the man they call “Big C” – a nickname derived from the frequent mispronunciation of his name (it’s KEER-AHN) – kissed the dealer’s hand. He mugged for the television cameras and pretended to throw a thick brick of bills into the crowd. Then he took $250,000 of his winnings and parceled it out amongst a close circle of friends, a group of fellow pros who all know what it’s like to toil away at poker far away from the spotlight.

“These are all world-class players that just have been scratching at the door for a long time trying to get through,” O’Leary says of his group. “Fortunately for me I was one of the ones where somebody opened the door and let me in. And now I’m at that next level, at least from a recognition standpoint.”

It’s been a long road to this point for O’Leary. A decade ago, he came to the United States with two skills: carpentry and poker. After a brief stop in Boston, he hopped on an Amtrak for a cross-country ride to San Francisco. He immediately put both of his skills to work, finding work at a construction company and finding plenty of poker action at casinos in the Bay Area and in Las Vegas.