Phil Gordon

Like many other poker players, Phil Gordon first learned the game from a family member as a small child. Born in El Paso, Texas in 1970, Phil’s family would go on vacations to visit his Aunt Lib in South Carolina where they would play Five Card Draw with a penny-ante.

Returning to Texas, Gordon dropped out of high school, but not for the standard reasons. Actually, when he was 15 years old, Phil was awarded the National Merit Scholarship which allowed him to enter college without a high school diploma. When he was just 20 year old, he earned a degree in computer science of the Georgia Institute of Technology. After college, Gordon worked for Lockheed for a couple years, then moved on to bigger and better things when he became the first employee and head software engineer for the technology company Netsys Techonolgies, Inc. After only a few years, industry mogul Cisco purchased the company for $95,000,000, a decent chunk of which, went directly into Phil’s pocket.

With his new found fortune Gordon “retired” and set out on a ‘round the world vacation, floating down the Amazon river and tracking gorillas. When he was bitten by the poker bug, he returned to the United States and entered into a few events at the World Series of Poker in 2000. After some very modest success, Phil worked on his game and returned to the desert the next year, this time finishing 4th behind Dewey Tomko and Carlos Mortenson in the $10,000 buy in Main Event. He took home nearly $400,000 for his win and an even bigger love for the game.

Three years later, after finding himself at a pair of W.S.O.P. final tables, Gordon claimed his first major win, taking down World Champion Chris Moneymaker at the $5,000 W.P.T. Baby 101 Shooting Stars event worth $360,000. In 2006, Phil’s biggest win came on Thanksgiving Day when he outlasted John Juanda, Erick Lindgren, Allen Cunningham and more to finish 1st in the FullTiltPoker.net Championship, netting $600,000 in the process.

In addition to being a successful player, Gordon has become something of a poker entrepreneur. He is the author of multiple poker books, including the “Little Book Series,” and was the face of the popular television show “Celebrity Poker Showdown.” If you ask Phil himself what he considers his most crowning achievement to be, he would probably talk about his charity “Bad Beat on Cancer.”

When his Aunt Lib, the original force behind his poker career died of liver cancer, Phil set up a poker oriented charity to raise money for cancer research. With multiple professionals pledging to help, ever year at the World Series of Poker entrants in poker events can contribute by donated 1% of their winnings. With Phil’s reputation in the community and his hard work, the charity has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and is going to continue to live on long after Gordon leaves the poker community which is hopefully going to be a long, long time from now.