Laid-off father of three wins $270,000 in poker championship

At the Choctaw Main Event this January, a new champion on the 2012 World Series of Poker Circuit emerged: 44-year-old Abraham Araya.

The currently laid-off father of three — Araya is an airline flight mechanic who lost his job when his company, which worked on NBA teams' airplanes, filed for bankruptcy — took home a victorious $270,380. Combined with the $83,659 he won in October's T.J. Cloutier Poker Challenge, his past few wins add up to roughly "four or five years' salary for an airline flight mechanic," WSOP reports.

"Right now I can't believe it. It didn't sink in yet," Araya, who lives in Texas, said moments after his victory. "I can't tell you how amazing this feeling is."

Araya moved to the United States 21 years ago to escape the war in East Africa. Now a husband and father to three children, Sabrina, Nathan and Thoman, the newly minted poker champion is living the American dream.

"But in order to achieve his dream, he had to work his way through a field like few Circuit stops have seen," Casino City Times reports.

Araya, who doesn't consider himself a professional poker player, won against some of the top players on the circuit.

He plans on using his winnings to take his children to see their grandparents in East Africa and then returning to Hawaii with his wife to relive their honeymoon for their 10th anniversary.