2004 WSOP Champion Greg Raymer Bio & Poker Profile

@Greg Raymer: 'People think poker is a game of cards but it’s really a game of people.'

The early years

Born in Minot, North Dakota, Greg Raymer moved to Florida with his famly when he was 10 and then lived in St. Louis, Missouri, where he finished high school and earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry. In 1989 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Master’s degree in biochemistry and then enrolled in the University of Minnessota Law School, graduating in 1992. He practiced as a patent attorney until his historic WSOP victory in 2004, working for bio-tech and pharmaceutical companies.

Poker beginnings

Greg Raymer came to poker from blackjack. Throughout his years as a student (until the age of 28) he was a professional blackjack player and card counter and had only played a little poker at his fraternity house in college.
A few years later, when he got a job in Chicago, he was looking for blackjack games but couldn’t find any. Instead, he found poker. Once Raymer discovered this new passion, he went about it in the systematic and rational way that befits his legal mind - reading and studying the poker books he could find (most notably, The Theory of Poker, by David Sklansky, which he has called ‘by far the best poker book out there’).

ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

For years Raymer grinded small cash games having made a ’deal’ with his wife that he would have a $1,000 bankroll and would quit forever if he ever lost it. It never came to that.

Instead, by 1998 he had started filing his taxes as part-time poker professional: ‘It certainly wasn’t my primary source of income between ’98 and 2004, but it was a nice bit of extra income.’
In 1999 his work took him to Connecticut and in the following years Raymer became a regular at the @Foxwoods Resort Casino poker tables.

The World Series of Poker

Raymer played his first World Series in 2001, when he entered 4 tournaments and cashed in a $1,500 PLO event.

2002 didn’t go so well and after losing $30,000, Raymer had to find backers in order to continue playing without touching the ‘family income’. He sold $500 shares to about 20 people and a couple of years later they must have been very pleased with their investment, when each share was worth $36,000 :)

In the spring of 2004 Raymer won a $160 PokerStars online satellite and was off for his third attempt at the Main Event. It certainly proved the saying ‘third time lucky’. The field that year was 2,576, building an enormous prize pool and first place prize of $5,000,000. Watch the final hand against @David Williams wih Greg Raymer's own commentary:

The very next year Greg Raymer amazed the poker world with another great performance and deep run in the 2005 WSOP Main Event, finishing 25th from a field of over 5,619.

Fossilman

The nickname derives from the fossil Greg Raymer uses as a card protector. In fact, in his early poker years, he would sell fossils to other players as a way of adding to his poker bankroll :) The fossil card protector goes well with his other famous trademark - the lizard eye hologram glasses.

I bought my original lizard-eye 3-D hologram sunglasses at the gift shop connected to the Tower of Terror ride at Disney MGM Studios in Disneyworld, Orlando, FL. I was there on a family vacation prior to my first attempt at the WSOP main event in 2002. I thought it would be a funny joke to put them on in the middle of an important hand. However, when I first did so, instead of making everybody laugh, the glasses freaked out my opponent in the hand, and caused him to fold. Since then, I’ve found that some of my opponents are very uncomfortable playing against me because of the glasses, and therefore I’ve continued to wear them during major tournaments.

ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

Today, I don’t wear those glasses anymore, for a few reasons. First, they are essentially just dark sunglasses with the hologram sticker on the outside. As dark sunglasses, they are too much of a hindrance to my vision unless I am in a VERY well lit space, such as a televised table.

Professional Poker Player

Raymer has always stuck to his own top advice to poker beginners: ‘Never gamble with money you can’t afford to lose’, and never considered risking his family’s financial security by leaving his job and playing full-time until 2004. Even then, it was the PokerStars sponsorship deal (2004-2011), rather than the cash prize, that decided him to make the move to full-time professional.

For years now Greg Raymer has been one of the most active ambassadors of the game, a committed advocate of U.S. online poker regulation, and Poker Players Alliance activist.
He has been operating his own training site since 2011, teaching seminars in various locations across the U.S. and offering private tutoring - www.fossilmanpokertraining.com

FossilMan Poker Trainingwww.fossilmanpokertraining.com

You can also follow Greg on ShareMyPair, where he regularly posts and discusses noteworthy hands: http://www.sharemypair.com/userweb/smpuserdetails/user_id/3079

ShareMyPair - Live Poker Game Hand Recorder and Replayer App for iPhone and AndroidQuickly and easily create your own personalized animated poker videos of hands youve played with our iOS and Android apps. Then instantly share them with your friends and followers using twitter, facebook, email, and text messaging.www.sharemypair.com

‘Just a result by itself doesn’t prove anything. Only a whole lot of results do.’

And ‘a whole lot’ is what you will find on his player profile page on RankingHero, boasting $7,459,055 in live earnings since 1998. Check out the complete listing of his tournament results, including the amazing FOUR @Heartland Poker Tour victories in 2012, making him the number one player on the all-time HPT leaderboard