They call him "The Grinder."

That's grinder as in he just keeps on keeping on. In the words of one admirer, "Kind of like the Energizer Bunny. Steady and dependable." Doesn't matter what the challenge is: tournaments, cash games, on line activity . . . he'll go wherever the action happens to be. That's 25-year old Michael Mizrachi who has been playing poker with a lot of success since before he was old enough to legally sit at the table. But he carried himself like he knew his way around the table. Besides, the kid had all the money. No one wanted to see him pack it in and leave.

Mizrachi, his wife and two young children split their time between homes in south Florida and Las Vegas, the latter having become a city where there is enough poker activity to keep any action-hungry card pro busy for most of any year.

He was busy with an on-line game ($75-$150 Omaha hi-lo) during a recent May afternoon as he took time out for an extended phone conversation with POKER PLAYER.

The subject of the conversation: the rigors of life in poker's fast lane which is where Mizrachi has been spending most of the last several years.

High stakes poker can produce dizzying arrays of highs and lows, but The Grinder had just come off a very pleasant high, taking first place and $114,850 in a World Poker Tour hold 'em event at Mandalay Bay. Mizrachi has $5.2 million in official lifetime tournament winnings, according to those who track such numbers. He was the 2005 Poker Pages Player of the Year and is atop the competition this year for the same honor at Card Player, although Mizrachi is the first to point out that there is still a lot of the year left to go. His tournament winnings through the first five months of 2006 totaled $2.1 million.

How did he get to be so good at such a young age? Mizrachi might have taken a shot at a little modesty here but perhaps he figured there was no reason to be anything less than candid.

"I guess it's in the genes with our family."

Oh.

Everyone is a dedicated poker player: mom, dad, a brother, his wife. The family that plays together, well . . .

"My mom plays on-line every day and my dad just recently played in his first tournament."

Mom sometimes comes to her son The Grinder with questions and Mizrachi tries to be helpful, but it isn't always easy.

"She'll tell me that she has this or that and she'll want to know what she should do, but she'll never give me the whole story. It's hard to be helpful. Mom, I need to know more. What you should do depends. I'll tell her that. What she should do depends on so many things. Was it a tournament, a cash game? What was her position? How about the chip count?"

Even on the telephone it is easy to imagine Mizrachi shaking his head, like, what's a helpful son supposed to do?

So when did he begin taking poker seriously?

"You mean like for money?"

Thinking about that for just a moment, or maybe he was considering a difficult moment in his on-line Omaha game.

"I was 15 when I started playing on line and then getting on the cruise ships. I went to the Indian casinos when I was under age."

Didn't spend a lot of time struggling or paying his dues, huh?

Mizrachi's tone seems to say, pleeeeeze. "I've been winning since the first day."

The first bricks and mortar casino he remembers playing in was one of the Indian places in Arizona.

This thing about people knowing him as "The Grinder" . . . It's a nom de plume, if you will , that he brought to his land-based play from the Internet.

"I thought it suited my image," he shrugs, "so I decided to go ahead and use it everywhere."

It's worked out nicely. Tournament regulars may have doubts about how to spell or pronounce Mizrachi, but they definitely know who The Grinder is. All part of a man becoming a legend in his own time, as in you're never too young to find a nickname that sticks.

The Grinder prefers a game that combines aggressiveness, caution and calculation but is mostly very heavy on aggressiveness. And if that's produced a poker table image that has made some people think of the late Stu Ungar, well. . . those are the kind of comparisons that don't hurt the image building at any age.

But is he consciously emulating the style of any one player?

Those are the kinds of questions that Mizrachi is clearly uncomfortable with. He is who he is, playing his own kind of game, and if that suggests cockiness, a touch of arrogance, the Grinder is not inclined to spend time agonizing over such issues.

"Yeah, I guess I play with a lot of confidence when I'm in a game. I'm always focused, keeping my mind straight and thinking about not making that one big mistake. I've gotta think about being cautious and when to make my big move."

He likens it to a chess game, a big mind game, "where you're trying to stay one step ahead of your opponent."

Mizrachi says that when everything is feeling like it is right and he is in that zone of sorts, "I know what he my opponent is going to do . . . I just feel it and I know what I am going to do when he makes that move."

It's all about working the instincts that get The Grinder to the right place at the right time.

Mizrachi has about $5.1 million in official prize money over the last several years, but does not see himself as a tournament specialist.

Nope. He'll play them all - cash games, tournaments. He has been an ambassador for Absolute Poker for about two months.

"I'm a spokesperson and spend a lot of time playing on the site, but we're going to start doing commercials. I'll be doing some writing. They're the fourth largest poker site."

What sold him on going with Absolute?

There will probably come a time when Mizrachi matures as a professional spokesman, when he may be inclined to fall back on carefully articulated references to the integrity and the well-crafted appeal of Absolute and what the company stands for . . . blah, blah, blah.

But for the time being Mizrachi gives the impression that this decision was a matter of all the principals getting to the right place at the right time.

Just one of those things. In other words, it just felt right.

"I've had a lot of people coming up to me and I've been turning them down for the last year and a half or so."

The impression he projects is that he'd just as soon play poker and not worry about being anyone's spokesman. But in this day and age it is difficult to turn your back on the opportunities that come so easily to the players with Mizrachi's record of success.

He did say yes to a chance to play on the current season of the GSN cable network's High Stakes Poker which was filmed several months ago at the Palms and edited into 16 60-minuite segments.

The program is unique among televised poker events in that players arrive at the table with varying amounts of their own money. There are no socalled tournament chips.

The mix of poker players and well-to-do businessmen each buy in with at least $100,000 of their own money although some players have come to the table with as much as a half-million or a million.

The game is no limit hold 'em with $100 antes and $300 and $600 blinds with an occasional $1,200 straddle.

As for the world of literature, Mizrachi concedes that he is "thinking" about a poker book, "but I'm not sure about it yet."

The book, if it happens, will probably focus on his life. The key to his success, how it all seemed to come together so quickly. Even at the age of 25, it seems that there is a lot to talk about.

At last year's World Series he tied for the most cashes (seven), pointing out that he had only limited playing time there because of commitments at other events elsewhere.

Trying to satisfy the appetite for poker that drove him through his teen years, Mizrachi skipped a lot of school and slept through other classes.

School and his appetite for poker seemed to be in total conflict. but by the time he hit his senior year in high school, he made an effort to turn things around, spending more time on his classes and getting As and Bs.

"I went to community college, but ended up dropping out because I could see there was just no way I was gonna be able to So he answered the call of his priorities.

"I just started playing every day. My brother and I we taught each other so many things, every kind of situation and what to do. We learned from each other, is what we did."

And they continued to play Mizrachi may or may not ever complete the book project, but one thing is certain . . . he's never depended on books to teach himself the ins and outs of success at the poker table.

"I've got my own creative style, my own game and strategies and I have never read a poker book."

There's no reason, he suggests, to tinker with a style that ain't broke.