Poker Place

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.

Like several of his fellow professionals, including Bryn Kenney, Justin Bonomo graduated to poker from ‘Magic: The Gathering’ at any early age. He frequently played poker online in his teenage years, but first came to worldwide attention when, in 2005, age the age of 19 – that is, still not of legal age to play live poker tournaments in the United States – he finished fourth in the European Poker Tour (EPT) French Open in Deauville, making him the youngest player to make the final table in a televised poker tournament.

Bonomo won his first of his three World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets in 2014, but his second and third in 2018, a year in which he won nine tournaments and over $25 million in prize money. Highlights of his ‘annus mirabilis’ included a Super High Roller Bowl China event at the Babylon Casino in Macau, worth HK$37.8 million, or $4.8 million, to the winner and, of course, the WSOP Big One for One Drop event at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, worth a staggering $10 million. Bonomo has definitely benefited from the rapid increase in the number of ‘high roller’ poker tournaments in the last decade but, even so, his unprecedented winning streak in 2018 took him to the top of the all-time money list, ahead of Daniel Negreanu, with just over $45 million in live earnings alone.

Formerly a frequent and successful online poker player, under the moniker ‘ZeeJustin’, Bonomo has courted his fair share of controversy over the years and was, in fact, banned by PartyPoker for operating multiple accounts at the same time. However, in recent years Virginia-born Bonomo, 33, has focussed solely on live poker tournaments and, if 2018 and the early part of 2019 are anything to go by, appears to have made a wise decision.