Player Focus: OMGClayAiken

OMGClayAiken, aka Phil Galfond, is yet another young and talented high stakes online cash player to make a meteoric rise to the top. He started playing $10 SNGs before building his bankroll up and after reading Sklansky’s ‘Hold ‘Em Poker For Advanced Players’ took a shot at the $5/$10 cash games. After a winning streak Phil went for the $25/$50 and $50/$100 games before losing his entire roll in just a few days. It was then that he moved in with “The Ballas” and from there he hasn’t looked back and has been playing the highest levels ever since. Having gone from playing $5/$10 to $200/$400 limits in the space of just two years, he is easily one of the most successful online players around (his PLO stats on Full Tilt show he is up over $2.4 million). Phil is still a member of the "Ship It, Holla" crew, a team of young Americans including durrr and raptor who consistently mingle in the biggest online games going. He credits Dwan with helping his game the most, and who made Phil realise that “You should think of every possible option you have in NLHE. You usually have a ton of them”. His astute and innovative reading of the game is highlighted by his regular columns for "Bluff" Magazine and he is one of the very few online specialists to have made an appearance on "High Stakes Poker".

During his brief spell on the show Galfond was critical not only of the way he was treated as an ‘onliner’ but also of the standard of play.

In a post on 2 2 Poker he wrote: “Just before going to bed that night, I was informed that 3 of the TV Pros from day 2 decided last minute that they wanted to play on day 3, and that I wasn’t good TV because I was so tight and didn’t talk enough to the players who don’t know me. So, I lost my spot on the table. To say the least, I was very mad.”

He goes on: “I would love it if someone would do a show where Me, durrr, Aba, and two more each play heads-up against Ivey, Doyle, Negreanu, etc. We each pair up with a pro and play best of 3 HU 200bb freeze-outs. Each team puts up $2m or whatever and whichever team wins most out of 5 splits the prize amongst themselves. Online pros v Live pros. Then maybe America would realize how it really is.”

Now that would be a game.

In June 2008 he announced himself to the offline world by winning his first WSOP Bracelet in Event #28 (the $5,000 PLO re-buys) for a whopping $817,781. This takes his live tournament winnings to just under a million dollars and is one of the few players in the world to show prowess in both fields of the game. His post-tournament interview was perhaps telling about the way he views modern poker and the sheer volume of hours he puts in: “The public and the poker community as a whole views winning a bracelet as so important, and because of that, I did. I felt that I had proven myself playing in the toughest games online for a long time now, but I hadn’t really proven myself to everybody. To me it means proving myself to everybody else.”

“I’ve played so many hands of PLO at all different stack sizes it’s almost second nature. I was focused even though I was nervous and stressed out about it. I still knew what to do; I’m so used to it.”