The legend

Phil Ivey Phil Ivey is wildly regarded by his peers and poker observers as the best all-around poker player in the world nowadays and he’s mostly the number one in many popularity lists. Probably because he has a great and warm character too, being a calm and shy person beside the table who’ve created his own charity (The Budding Ivey Foundation), mostly raising money for underprivileged children. But in contrast with his character, he’s known for his agressive and inventive play at the table. He’s just a phenomenon, some mysterious poker god with excellent reading and intimidation skills, adopting mostly the agressive smallball poker style. He knows when to change gears and he has absolute no fear to four or five bet, as we could see at one of the most famous hands ever against Paul Jackson.

He divorced in 2009 from his wife Luciaetta so take a shot all you single pokerminded ladies out there ! The unlucky ones may still send there application towards myself;) Mister Ivey likes basketball (often wearing jerseys at the table), video games, golf and any kind of prop bets.

He started to play regular poker against co-workers in the late 1990s and went to different Atlantic City casinos with his fake ‘No Home Jerome’ ID. He became a superb tournament player, placed 4 times in the top 25 at the World Series of Poker Main Event in the last 8 years ! I honestly believe he can win the big one some day, if he could avoid the important bad beats (such as his AK loss last year against Darvin Moon’s AQ). But still at the age of only 34, he’s the youngest player ever to have won 8 Bracelets at that age, all of them in non-Holdem events. He’ve made 9 WPT final tables (lost many times with AQ) and 1 EPT final table. He won the Monte Carlo Millions in 2005 and won 2 NBC’s Poker After Dark titles.

He’s also an outstanding cash game player, which he’ve proved in different tv shows such as GSN’s High Stakes Poker (season 3 and 6) and Full Tilt Poker Million $ Cash Game making big profits. Naturally he’s a regular at the Big Game at the Bellagio ($4.000-8.000 mixed). In 2006 Phil played heads-up, with stakes $25,000/50,000, against billionaire Andy Beal and won over $16,000,000 in only three days. Mister Ivey is of course one of the big guns at the online poker world, with yearly average earnings of over 5 million dollars.

ID & career

> born 01/02/1976 in Riverside, California (USA)

> resides now in Las Vegas, Nevada.

> Nickname : ‘ The Tiger Woods of Poker ‘ or ‘ No Home Jerome ‘

> became 7th at the WSOP Main Event in 2009

> won 8 Bracelets (’00, ‘05 PLO/ ‘02 7 Card Stud Hi/Lo, S.H.O.E, 7 Card Stud/ ‘09 NL 2-7 Draw Lowball, Omaha Hi/Lo – 7 Card Stud Hi/Lo/ ‘10 H.O.R.S.E.)

> won 1 WPT-title (’08 L.A. Poker Classic)

> plays online at Full Tilt Poker as a part of the design team

> has Live Tournament Winnings of over $ 13,600,000 (until 2010)

> ranked 1st on the all time live tournament winnings list.