Player Name: Phil Ivey

Nick Name: No Home Jerome

Age: 34

From: New Jersey, USA

Phil Ivey was born in 1976 and grew up in New Jersey. He worked in telemarketing and sales, but he had a passion to play cards. His grandfather had taught him to play Stud poker but he was too young to get into the Casinos in Atlantic City so he obtained a fake ID in the name of Jerome Graham. He played so often that the local players gave him the nickname ?No Home Jerome? and on the day he was old enough to enter the casino legally, he apologised to the casino manager and said ?My name is Phil, Phil Ivey?, the manager just laughed and said Phil Ivey will be a big name one day, never a truer word said in jest.

For the next few years he continued to grind it out until the summer of 2000 when he won a bracelet in the $2,500 PL Omaha Event at the World Series of Poker. After he won his first bracelet he was unstoppable. He would spend long hours playing in tough cash games and earning a name for himself as an extremely aggressive player. It was in 2002 that he won three more bracelets at the WSOP in the 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo, 7 Card Stud and S.H.O.E events. Then is 2005 in the $5,000 PL Omaha tournament, he won a massive $635,603 and the coveted bracelet, this gave him a total of 5 now at the tender age of just 29. But what he wants most is a WSOP main event win. He has managed to make the final table but not yet finished first.

Phil has also been very active on the World Poker Tour. He made the final table in seven different events but never placed better then 2nd. In a few of those WPT tournaments he was knocked out holding the same hand (A-Q) which seems to bring a lot of bad luck to poker players. Doyle Brunson stated in his book Super System that he never plays the hand, it gets you in too much trouble too often, but he has been caught playing it once or twice.

Phil has also done very well in lots of other tournaments around the world. In 2005 he won $1,000,000 in the Monte Carlo Millions and the very next day won $600,000 at the Full Tilt Poker Invitational also in Monte Carlo. In 2006 he finished 2nd in a European Poker Tour event worth $486,000 and finished 7th in the European Poker Masters event taking home another $150,000. He has currently won almost 8 million dollars from major live events.

In 2006, Texan Billionaire Andy Beal issued a challenge to the best poker players in the world that he wanted to play High Stakes $25,000/50,000 fixed limit Texas Hold'em. Andy believed that playing for huge stakes and trying to bully with money would throw players off their game. As no one individual was prepared to take on Andy, ?The Corporation? a group of players including Doyle and Todd Brunson, Ted Forrest, Johnny Chan, Jennifer Harman and Phil Ivey was formed and took it in turns to take him on.

They got off to a bad start losing $10,000.000 but along came Phil Ivey. After three days of intense heads up play Phil had not only recouped this loss but had gone on to take a further $6.600.000 from Andy at which point the Texan billionaire gave in.

Phil is also a founder member of Full Tilt Poker and can regularly be seen playing the nosebleed games there, where it?s not unusual for half a million dollars to swop hands in a couple of hours. He also made the final table at last years 2009 WSOP.

Ivey was the favorite at the final table of the 2009 WSOP Main Event. Any time Ivey was all-in, the Penn and Teller Theater was as silent as a library. When he busted out in seventh place for $1.4 million, the crowd was completely dumbfounded. On his final hand, Ivey?s A-K fell to Darvin Moon?s A-Q when the extremely lucky Moon hit a queen on the flop. Phil received a standing ovation from the crowd and the assembled mob of admiring poker players in attendance.

Phil truly is one of the greatest poker players in the world!!

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