Back-to-Back November Niner Mark Newhouse Bio and Poker Profile

"Mark Newhouse you have achieved the impossible and you are a SUPERSTAR"; "ESPN have a national treasure on their watch and his story eclipses all that have gone before him"; "Mark Newhouse's World Series of Poker achievement is simply amazing". This is just a random sample of reactions in poker media and forum threads dedicated to Mark Newhouse's incredible accomplishment - making the single most important final table in poker in two consecutive years.

"@Mark Newhouse was born on March 11, 1985 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After high school he went to the Appalachian State University in North Carolina. However, he only stayed for about a year and spent most of the second semester playing on PartyPoker.

Mark quit school to play full time - mainly online and cash games. His career in live tournament poker began in 2006 with the 37th Annual World Series of Poker. Mark Newhouse final tabled the very first tournament he played: Event 23, $3,000 Limit Texas Hold’em. He ultimately finished fifth for $56,470.

In September of the same year, Mark scored his biggest cash to date - $1,519,020 at the $10,000 buy-in WPT Borgata Poker Open:

The prize got him into the young poker millionaire club but it also marked the beginning of a darker period in his life. The Commerce Casino in Los Angeles became his home for a while and he played a lot of high-stakes cash games. Somehow he managed to blow through the money in about a year and then got into debt. ‘My head was not in the right place’ and ‘I was unconscious’, he says of that period in his life.

Yet he rode out this downswing to eventually regain control of himself and of his game:

“Right now I am a totally different person than I was then, and I am on the right track. I'm sort of in a rebuilding mode. I have made nearly every mistake you can make in this business and learned from all of them. I am doing my best to do the right things these days and things are going pretty well for me now. The road to rebuilding is a much longer and slower one than the road of destruction, but with a healthy lifestyle, a hard work ethic, a little discipline, and the experience of past mistakes my goals don't seem all that far away.”

Throughout the years Mark Newhouse has been a regular at the World Series of Poker Main Event. His big WSOP breakthrough came in 2013 when he made the November Nine for the first time:

Mark Newhouse was the first to leave the final table in November 2013. He was extremely disappointed but the ninth place came with a $733,224 prize which helped him get his finances in better shape.

“I would rather finish 10th than ninth. Ninth is brutal, man. As far as emotionally, I think that’s the worst place to finish in the tournament, with all the hype leading up to it and come back, and you’re out. So, anything but ninth.”

By advancing to the final table in the 2014 WSOP Main Event Mark Newhouse has made poker history as the first back-to-back November Niner ever since the format was introduced in 2008. Many poker pros and writers consider this the ultimate poker achievement even if Mark himself is shying away from the superlatives.

“It’s a huge accomplishment, but I’m not the type to say I’m great or whatever. Even though this year getting in is a bigger deal than it was last year, I was really just having fun the whole time. Just playing poker, not too much pressure, not thinking about it, and I made it.”