David "Bullitos" van der Weele is a Dutch poker pro who hails from the city of Groningen.
In his youth van der Weele spent his time either playing sports, namely football (soccer) and basketball, or hanging out with friends playing computer games. As with many other future poker players he became somewhat obssessed with strategy games, especially "Command & Conquer".
David first came across poker whilst playing basketball with friends back in 2006. One of his friends told him how his nephew had won $1,500 playing online poker - at the time van der weele had never even heard of poker, but the idea of playing a computer game for money appealed to him and he checked it out.
At the time sites were often running '$10 no deposit' bonuses to lure new players to their fledgling sites and van der weele took full advantage of these by playing small stakes limit hold'em. He studied the game whenever he could, citing books by David Sklansky and Ed Miller as instrumental to his fundamental understanding of the game.
With the bankroll he built at limit hold'em David went on to unlock deposit bonuses at other sites, never having to spend his own money on his way to millionaire status.
After reaching a plateau at limit, van der Weele decided to switch to NLHE, and says he found it an easy jump to make, and that the fundamentals he had learned at limit helped him great at NL. He took his €5k bankroll over to the $0.50/$1 tables in January 2007, and by May was playing with a comfortable roll at $5/$10. In fact it was only at $25/$50 that van der Weele hit problems, saying it took him 6 months of shot taking, downswings, and rebuilding before he felt comfortable at $5k NL. In a 2011 interview Bullitos says that he only really felt comfortable at $25/$50 when he had a bankroll of $1m.
Bullitos played as high as $100/$200 NLHE before switching to PLO in 2011. Despite being a seasoned high stakes pro, he did his PLO learning the old fashioned way, starting at $2/$4 and working his way up. He now plays at the highest stakes online and is a regular in any decent $200/$400 line-up at PokerStars.
Strangely enough, despite admitting that in his "Command & Conquer" days he would play all day and night, Bullitos says he has never felt the same "addiction" to poker, and that generally he won't play sessions longer than a couple of hours and that by playing short sessions he not only gets to enjoy life and his family (Bullitos is a proud dad according to his twitter status!) outside of poker but that he knows he will always be sharp and focussed when he does play.