Poker Players

Johnson Juanda, usually known as ‘John’ or by his nicknames, ‘J.J.’ or ‘Luckbox’, was born in Indonesia, but has resided in the United States since 1990 and is currently based in Marina del Rey, California. He currently lies fourteenth in the all-time money list, with $25.2 million in total live earnings.

Since turning professional in 1997, Juanda has won five World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelets in poker variants including Texas hold’em, Omaha hold’em, stud and draw lowball, a European Poker Tour (EPT) title and numerous other tournaments worldwide. Indeed, he won his last tournament, a Triton Poker Super High Roller Series event in Budva, Montenegro – for which he collected HK$4,720,000, or $601,358 – as recently as May, 2019. His biggest payout, though, came in another event in the same series in Macau in 2017, when he claimed the first prize of HK$22,410,400, or $2,870,092, by defeating Fedor Holz heads-up.

Juanda, who turned 48 in July, 2019, has a reputation as a conservative, low-profile player and a man of few words; in fact, he is known, in some quarters, as the ‘Silent Assassin’. Nevertheless, he is one of the most successful and consistent players, online and live, of the last twenty years or so and was, quite rightly, inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2015. Fellow professional Daniel ‘Kid Poker’ Negreanu, who introduced Juanda at the Hall of Fame ceremony at Binion’s, once called him ‘the most underrated and neglected superstar’ in poker.

Phillip ‘Phil’ Ivey Jr. started playing poker, illegally, in Atlantic City, New Jersey as a teenager. In fact, one of his nicknames, ‘No Home Jerome’, derives from the fake identification he used to play live poker in those early days. Nevertheless, Ivey, who turned 42 in 2019, has blossomed into, arguably, the best all-round poker player in the world. He currently lies twelfth in the all-time money list, with $26.4 million in live earnings.

In the World Series of Poker (WSOP), Ivey has won ten bracelets, the same number as Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson and five fewer than all-time leader Phil Hellmuth, who has fifteen bracelets to his name. Ivey won his first WSOP bracelet in 2000, when he defeated the late Thomas Preston Jr., better known as ‘Amarillo Slim’, heads-up in a Pot Limit Omaha event at Binion’s, Las Vegas; it was, in fact, the first time his illustrious opponent had been beaten heads-up at a final table in the WSOP.

In 2017, Ivey admitted to ‘edge sorting’ – that is, exploiting subtle defects on the back of playing cards to identify them as beneficial or otherwise – at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic Jersey. Consequently, he and his playing partner, Cheung Yin ‘Kelly’ Sun, were found in breach of the casino contract and ordered to repay $10.1 million in winnings They did not and, in early 2019, a federal judge granted permission for the Borgata to pursue assets belonging to Ivey in Nevada, having discovered that he holds non such assets in New Jersey.

Massachusetts-born Daniel Colman currently ranks seventh on the all-time money list, with live earnings of just shy of $29 million. His position is thanks, in no small part, to the second largest payout in poker tournament history, $15,306,668, which Colman took home after winning the World Series of Poker (WSOP) ‘Big Drop for One Drop’ tournament in 2014. In fact, 2014 proved to be a seminal year for the 23-year-old Colman, who collected four titles, including the European Poker Tour (EPT) Super High Roller event in Monte Carlo and the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in Hollywood. Nevertheless, Colman caused controversy by flatly refusing to give interviews after Big Drop for One Drop and later calling poker ‘a harmful game’.

Colman began playing poker as a 17-year-old, in online heads-up sit-and-go tournaments, where he attracted the attention of former hedge fund manager Olivier Busquet, nowadays heralded as one of the best players of that form of poker in the world, who became his sponsor. By his own admission, in 2012, Colman was on the verge of abandoning poker to return to his college studies but, having ‘messed up’ his applications, decided to give the game one last try. The following year, he became the first player of hyper-turbo poker – in which blind levels increase every three minutes or so – in online history to win over $1 million in single calendar year; in fact, in just nine months, Colman amassed a total $1,018,708, before rakeback, on the Pokerstars network.

The main poker event at the WSOP has traditionally gathered thousands of professional punters who wanted to get to the WSOP Main Event every year.

Being the champion of such a special tournament is one of the greatest honours in the world of gambling. This is why the winners of the Main Event will always have a special place in the history of poker.

Hossein Ensan made history in the poker tournament.

Who is Hossein Ensan?

Here are some interesting facts about the man who cashed out a whopping $10 million prize at the final table of the WSOP event in 2019.

This famous German poker player was born in Iran in 1964. At the age of 25, he decided to move to Germany, which has been his home country ever since. Currently, he resides in the city of Munster. Hossein Ensan used to work as a painter before playing poker professionally. He had been playing poker since he was 18, but only began playing professional poker in 2012.

One of the main tournaments won by Hossein Ensan was the seniors’ event at the European Poker Tour in Barcelona. A week later he finished third, scooping as much as €652,000 at the final table in 2014. After his win in Barcelona, he decided to try his luck at the EPT Malta in 2015 and even made it to the final table; but in the end, he finished sixth. His adventures with EPT continued in Prague when he won the main event and bagged €754,000.

The next lucky year was 2017. He became a winner in a WSOP circuit ring in Rozvadov, Czech Republic. After this event, he accumulated around $2,6 million in profits. All in all, he participated in 36 tournaments before his historical win in 2019.

Hossein Ensan’s German and Iranian fans went wild the moment they learned he had won the $10 million prize pool and a golden bracelet worth $500,000.