For some people there is no such thing as retirement. Even if they could comfortably give up working and just spend the rest of their days sitting on a porch watching the grass grow, they just can’t do it. Alan Smurfit is one of those people.

Born in Ireland, Smurfit worked his way up to become one of the nation’s most successful businessmen. Then, in his early 60s, he sold off his Dublin-based packaging business for $3.9 billion.

By anyone’s standards, that’s plenty of money to retire with. But Smurfit saw it as an opportunity to try something else in life – poker.

He moved to Miami, Fla., where he took up professional poker playing to fill his free time.

The change in professions appears to have been fairly lucrative for the billionaire. He’s cashed in a few World Poker Tour events since entering the tournament world in 2004, along with other smaller events.

In 2007 he picked up his first World Series of Poker cash ever when he took down the $1,500 Pot-Limit Hold’em w/ re-buys event. It was his second year competing at the WSOP and all that practice resulted in a gold bracelet win and $464,867.

It wasn’t an easy victory either; the final table included four previous WSOP bracelet winners with a total of nine bracelets between them. Starting at dead last in the chip count, Smurfit had to have a lot of patience and positive thinking to make a comeback and take the event.

It took just over nine hours for him to get that victory, with six of those hours played heads-up for 167 hands against Qushqar Morad, who has a bracelet win from the 2002 WSOP.

After his win, Alan Smurfit did what you would expect most retirees to do to celebrate – he went out for a nice quiet dinner with friends.

“Well I'm not a party animal! I'm a poker animal,” he told PokerListings.com after his win.

Being “relatively well-off” has it’s perks – one of which is that we’re likely to see Alan Smurfit hitting some other high-profile events in the years to come as he continues his poker hobby.