Brian Townsend

Very few players have risen through the ranks of poker like Brian Townsend. When he was 23 in 2005, Brian caught the poker bug when he played $2/$4 at a local casino and began playing weekly. He deposited his first $50 to try his hand at online poker and promptly lost it, but he was hooked.
When first starting, Townsend played only Limit Hold ‘em and work his way up through the limits and was soon playing as high as $50/$100. In January 2006, he decided to give No Limit a shot and started at the lowest buy-in games learning at $.25/$.50. With the help of proper bankroll management and poker strategy forums, Brian would move up when he had 20 buy-ins for the next level, and back down if he dropped below that mark. This wash, rinse, repeat strategy quickly helped propel him to the highest stakes games on the internet.

The competitive fire Brian developed while playing sports growing up pushed him to become the best NLHE player in the world. After making $36,000 in one month on Party Poker, and even more the next month, Townsend dropped out of graduate school, (he already had a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara) and began playing poker full time.

Under the screen name sbrugby, inspired by his membership on the 2003 UCSB championship rugby team, Brian was playing the highest available limits in no time, taking on any opponents. Playing $200/$400 and $300/$600 NLHE games with respective buy-ins of $40,000 and $60,000, Townsend was regularly beating well respected professionals such as Phil Ivey and Ram Vaswani.

After learning, and easily beating the same stakes Pot Limit Omaha games, Townsend took his skills to Las Vegas during the 2007 World Series of Poker. While at the Bellagio, Brian played in some of the biggest stakes games the poker world had ever seen. Playing a mix of $1,000/$2,000 NLHE and PLO, Townsend walked away a $1,850,000 winner in one day. With a lineup including David Benyamine and Patrik Antonius, he proved himself as not just another internet flash in the poker world pan.

Since then, Brian has made appearances on High Stakes Poker and Full Tilt’s Million Dollar Cash game. Always wanting to be the best at what he does, he has also been honing his skills in all different forms of poker, trying to become a top mixed game player. Townsend also became a co-owner and instructor at Cardrunners.com, a poker coaching site created by Taylor Caby and Andrew Wiggins, also professional poker players. More recently Brian was invited by Full Tilt to put his name in red letters and become a Full Tilt Pro, playing a variety of high stakes games.