Phil Ivey Bio

As professional wrestler Ric Flair said through his career, “To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.” Right now “The Man” in the world of poker is Phil Ivey. Phil Ivey is considered by most everyone to be the best all-around poker player on the planet. For years, Ivey has been one of the most consistent winners both in online and in live action poker. He plays the biggest games on the planet, and beats them all.

Ivey believes that in order to be a great poker player, you must be able to play every game and be able to win at every game. He says that some of the best games to play in are mixed games since most players are not able to play all games well.

Many people know Phil Ivey as a mixed games player, while most casual poker fans know him as a great NL Holdem player. What you may be surprised to learn is that Ivey’s best game happens to be 7 Card Stud. Ivey grinded out the stud cash games in Atlantic City to start out his career. Ivey started well before the poker boom, and in Atlantic City, stud was king. Ivey and a few other pros moved their ways up through the stud cash game ranks before Ivey finally took his game to new heights in Las Vegas.

If you look at Ivey’s tournament resume, you will see that stud plays a big part in his success at the World Series of Poker. In 2002, Ivey tied history by winning three bracelets in one year. Those bracelets were in 7 Card Stud, 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo, and S.H.O.E. S.H.O.E. is 50 percent stud.

If you look at his success in the last three years at the WSOP, you will notice once again that Stud plays a huge role in his success. Ivey was runner-up in the Stud World Championship in 2007 and missed the final table of the Stud World Championship in 2008 by one spot. He also cashed in five H.O.R.S.E. tournaments at the WSOP between 2006 and 2008, including a 4th place finish in the $5,000 H.O.R.S.E. event in 2007 and a 3rd place finish in the inaugural $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. World Championship in 2006.

Ivey can be regularly seen playing at the highest stakes online at Full Tilt Poker. While PLO and Holdem get most of the attention, he is frequently at the mixed tables and is usually at the top of the online leaderboard for money won. Ivey doesn’t frequently have folks lined up to play him at the mixed tables like he does at the other tables. Chances are they cannot figure out a way to counteract his significant advantage in stud.

Ivey does not play as many tournaments as he used to because he prefers to play cash games. He can make as much in one pot as he can by winning a tournament, so unless the event is high profile, odds are you won’t see him there. He even has a reduced WSOP schedule over year’s past. Regardless of his schedule, you are likely to find him in the H.O.R.S.E. events and in the stud events, many times at or near the top of the leaderboard.

“To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.” However, how do you beat a player that has such a significant advantage as Ivey does in stud? The simple answer would be to not play Ivey in stud. Many people call Ivey the “Tiger Woods of Poker.” Ivey is just 30 years old and just now really hitting the true prime of his poker career. By the time Ivey is done, the only person that he is likely to be compared to is Mohammad Ali, “The Greatest of All-Time.”