Phil Laak

Phil Laak was born on September 8, 1972 in Dublin, Ireland. He studied at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and graduated from there with a degree in mechanical engineering.

He married actress Jennifer Tilly in 2005. Besides this, information regarding the poker player’s parents and other family members is unknown to the media. Laak is known to be the former roommate of California-based Iranian poker player Antonio Esfandiari. As of now, Laak is active on the social networking site Twitter and he keeps updating his handle from time to time.

In 2004, Phil Laak achieved his first major tournament victory at World Poker Tour (WPT) Celebrity Invitational. The following year, he finished second at the 2005 World Series of Poker. He then defeated Ram Vaswani and won the inaugural William Hill Poker Grand Prix to take home the £150,000 prize. Laak then participated in the tournament titled "Phil Phil" and won NBC's ‘Poker After Dark’ in which he earned the weekly prize of $120,000.

In the year 2007, he, along with professional poker player Ali Eslami beat the poker playing computer program ‘Polaris’ at the conference held under Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Two years later, Laak participated in Aussie Millions cash game Invitational. In 2009, he won the title of PartyPoker.com World Open V and received $250,000.

He won his first career WSOP bracelet by winning the ₤2,500 buy-in Six-Handed No-Limit Hold’em championship that took place at the World Series of Poker Europe on September 16, 2010. On April 12, 2012, the Irish poker player played live at The Big Game. There, he messed up a €63,750 winning hand and set the record for the biggest televised poker blunder in history.