Amazing Feats in WSOP History – Phil Ivey

I could just type out the name “Phil Ivey”, leave the rest of this post blank, and spare you the dead horse I’m about to beat going on about just how incredible a player he is.

For starters, he became the all-time leading tournament money player last year, edging out Daniel Negreanu after a storybook year at the Aussie Millions and World Series of Poker (WSOP), sitting currently with $13,531,757.

Secondly, the graph of his tracked cash game play looks like a waypoint set from Texas to New England. In just over three years at internet poker’s highest stakes, Ivey has won $19,044,447. These numbers don’t factor in the little known heads-up desecration where he filleted Texas billionaire Andy Beal like an Angus steer.

Beal was a man who struck it rich in banking and real estate. He was a certifiable mathematical genius and had a sweet tooth for poker. Between 2001-2006 at the Wynn in Las Vegas, he played limit hold’em heads-up matches with The Corporation, a syndicate formed of some of some of the greatest pros to have played the game: Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Todd Brunson, Ted Forrest, Jennifer Harman, Howard Lederer, Gus Hansen, Barry Greenstein, Chau Giang, Johnny Chan, Minh Ly, David Gray, Hamid Dastmalchi, among others. On May 13th, 2004, Beal earned what has been reported as the largest single day score in poker cash game history, winning $11.7 million from Reese, Harman, Hansen, and Dastmalchi. The battle was far from over.

Beal would return in 2006, claiming the entire $10 million stake The Corporation assembled from the Vegas community.  Much like a pool hustler pulling out a custom cue from its case after bombing his first couple games, The Corporation went to their bags and pulled out Ivey. The edge Beal brought to the games was agreeing upon limits that even the biggest name pros had rarely seen, leaving some of the most seasoned players unnerved. Starring into the face of $30,000/60,000 limits, which were later raised to $50,000/100,000, Ivey barely blinked. He would go on to take $16.6 from the billionaire, winning back The Corp’s initial $10 million and seeing himself well in the black. The end result was that of a JV basketball team taking on the Harlem Globetrotters. Beal has since to return back to Vegas.

Cash games aside, his tournament accolades are equally stunning. Ivey currently owns the record for most World Poker Tour (WPT) final tables, having made nine final tables out of his 11 cashes. To anyone else this would be a miraculous feat, but it just leaves you thinking “Pshhh…that crazy Phil Ivey!” His streak of seven final tables without a victory would come to an end in 2008 at the L.A. Poker Classic Championship, when he took down the trophy and $1,596,100 more to add to the money pit.

While this quickly became an article that should have been titled “Amazing Feats in Poker History”, I’m about to bring the satellite back into the WSOP orbit. Of all of his amazing achievements, two of them manage to stand out somehow on a laundry list already written in gold, underlined in platinum, and kept in a frame made of diamonds and bald eagle scalps.

Ivey is one of only four players to have had a three-bracelet year as I had mentioned in a previous “Amazing Feats in WSOP History”, joining the ranks of Ted Forrest, Phil Hellmuth, and Jeffrey Lisandro. Coupled with the fact that last year, he won two more bracelets ($2,500 no-limit 2-7 draw lowball; $2,500 split omaha hi/lo & 7 card stud hi/lo) AND final tabled the Main Event, he essentially leaps light years ahead of his three aforementioned peers, and unsurprisingly, sits alone in the glory of another incredible poker achievement.

Without a doubt, what is arguably Ivey’s finest accomplishment and can easily be considered the all-time leading achievement in WSOP Main Event history are his four top 25 finishes over the past decade of the $10,000 championship. The average Joes that dish out the buy-in watching their favorite pros on TV can only hope to cash in it. The pros playing for all the dead money can only expect to make the bubble. Nobody has done it quite like Ivey. He’s placed the following years, earning the specified amounts out of the following fields:

• 23rd – 2002 – $40,000 – 631 players
• 10th – 2003 – $82,700 – 839 players
• 20th -  2005 – $304, 680 – 5619 players
• 7th – 2009 – $1,404,002 – 6494 players

What else can be said that hasn’t already? Ivey is poker’s greatest export and has drastically increased its gross domestic product (GDP) with his glaring stare, fearless demeanor, innate abilities, and by being a man driven by the competition as much as he is the action. Records and numbers are meant to be broken and surpassed, but when people look back on the annals of poker, there will always be only one Phil Ivey.

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