Famous Poker Players: Phil Ivey

Famous Poker Players » Famous Poker Players: Phil Ivey

One of the best--and most aggressive--professional poker players in the world is Atlantic City, New Jersey's own Phil Ivey, aka "No Home Jerome". One of the youngest among living famous poker players, Ivey started playing poker at the age of eight, and was involved in sales as a telemarketer before he decided to turn poker pro at the incredibly old age of 20. So, let's see...Atlantic City; penny-ante poker training from grandpa from a very young age; professional sales experience...sounds like a formula for making a future poker star, does it not?

Ivey is an over-the-top aggressive poker player. He has one of the most unusual poker faces--he almost always looks kind of sad, even when he's got a royal straight flush! His aggressiveness has made him famous for being able to play the utterly worst pocket hand in all of poker, the 7-2 split, as if he's got pocket aces. (But, even Phil admits to having a tricky time playing Ace-Queen, a good but dangerous pocket pack that I've written of elsewhere.) Besides his sad poker face, Ivey is known for sporting his iPod.

Nowadays Phil, who was born in 1976, lives in Las Vegas with his wife. He had five World Series of Poker bracelets before his 30th birthday, starting when he was 23 and defeated Poker Brat Phil Hellmuth and Amarillo Slim in the Pot-Limit Omaha event, and he has gone to the final table of the World Poker Tour seven times and come away with one victory there (in February of 2008). Ivey has over $10 million in poker earnings. In January 2006, Phil was named Player of the Year by "All In" and "Bluff" magazines and the UK Gaming Awards. Not long after that he went on to place second in the Omaha Hi/Lo event and third in the $50,000 HORSE event at the 2006 WSOP. Those two events alone enabled him to cash for more than $800,000.

"If you play a lot of poker, you realize that the better players play a lot of hands and they take chances. The players that don't do as well are just sitting there folding every hand and not taking chances. I'm playing against the best players in the world day in and day out, so you can't just sit there and play only good hands all the time. You've got to take some chances and know when you're beat and know how to get certain advantages," says Phil. Amen to that!

This famous professional poker player who has so much to teach plays online exclusively at Full Tilt Poker. Check out one of the masters!

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