How the "Tiger Woods" of poker piles up the cash....
CASH CLINGS TO IVEY Phil Ivey, the Tiger Woods of poker, is now officially a money machine. His 2005 recorded earnings topped $6,000,000. Aspects of his poker life read like snatches from a Hollywood film script. The difference in real life is that all the following incidents are true and it’s high time Tinsletown found a young Denzil Washington to portray Ivey’s early poker years. Just last year Ivey’s pal and fellow gifted poker star, Barry Greenstein, noticed that Phil had not registered for the Pot Limit Omaha tournament at the WSOP. He thought this was strange as Omaha at this level is one of Ivey’s favourite styles of poker. He woke Ivey up with a phone call and persuaded a tired Phil to play. Ivey won the Omaha bracelet and the $635,000 that went with it. The reason the world of Ivey makes such a good story is that when he does have a “bad luck” day even those occasions turn out to be jaw-dropping. In 2002 at the World Series of Poker, Phil was climbing all over John Shipley with a Full House, secure in the knowledge that only a final ace would give Shipley a highly improbable four-of-a-kind! The fourth Ace duly arrived down the pipe and Shipley’s impossible quads despatched Ivey’s Full House! It was pure Hollywood! The cream on the cake is that Phil Ivey is rock star good looking and just twenty six years old. His meteoric rise to fame really only gained traction in the year 2000. Early on he famously binned a one thousand dollar pair of sunglasses when they caused him to misread his cards and lose a $100,000 pot. He has never worn sunglasses at a table since. Ivey learned his skills at poker initially from his grandfather who would attempt to cheat the young Phil and only ended up bewitching him with the game that now dominates his life. Having lost dramatically in his first few months of what he now describes as his “learning period” he went on to be beat poker’s greatest living legend Amarillo “Slim” Preston for the WSOP 2000 bracelet at the ludicrous age of twenty. Since then he’s accumulated more bracelets than Paris Hilton and a polite movie star charisma that should see him through to his own self proclaimed ambition. “Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan set their sights on ten WSOP bracelets. I want thirty!” It’s on the cards.
A REBUFF! A rebuff is something that is usually only tried by top professionals against one another when one of them catches the whiff of a bluff in the air. They then set out to bluff the bluffer. If you have seen this take place on television it makes for exciting viewing. Risky and not recommended unless you know the player concerned well enough to have real suspicions, in which case it can be very rewarding.
