Max Villemure has made one of the fastest rises to the top action in the history of the game….
The meteoric rise of Maxime Villemure is scarcely believable, even by poker standards.
Precious little is known about the French-Canadian but according to maximevillemure.com he only took up poker in 2007 after watching the WSOP on television; now he has won over $1million at the EPT Monte Carlo and is regularly tussling with the likes of Phil Ivey & Patrik Antonius in the highest online cash games anywhere.
His online alias of ‘BeepBeepImaJeep’ (which made a list of best poker screen names on Two Plus Two) made over $215,000 at the toughest cash games on the net in October – considering his first MTT cash on Full Tilt was in August 2007, it looks increasingly likely that the 19 year-old did actually only take up the game just over a year ago.
Villemure first came to the attention of the poker world in April’s EPT Grand Final, where he outlasted 840 other runners to make the final table. According to Poker Listings, “The French-Canadian played an extremely powerful game and terrorized every table he was at with his penchant for re-raising before the flop.”
Shortly afterwards he was unfortunate to lose a straight vs straight hand with eventual winner Glen Chorny, but for his 3rd place finish still managed to collect a whopping $1,131,383 for his troubles. When you consider that his highest online tournament cash is $10,523 for a second in the FT $60,000 GTD last December, you get an idea of just how much this has increased his bankroll.
It is no co-incidence that BeepBeepImaJeep started showing up in the $200/$400NLH & PLO games shortly thereafter, but surely such an inexperienced player wouldn’t last two minutes in these games, right? Wrong. Villemure has been on a serious hot streak since his unprecedented arrival at the nose bleed games, and has taken big scores off the likes of Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies, Patrik Antonius & Phil Ivey (he made $40,000 in just 13 hands off the latter). It’s fair to say he has had his fair share of luck, however: one such example is this mis-click which won him $82,000 against Sahamies which resulted in more hilarious textbox gold from Sahamies:
BeepBeepImaJeep: misclick
BeepBeepImaJeep: LOL
BeepBeepImaJeep: wtf
BeepBeepImaJeep: meant to reraise to 4200
BeepBeepImaJeep: oh wow
Ziigmund: 500 1000\
Ziigmund: lets go u f ag
BeepBeepImaJeep: haha ziig
BeepBeepImaJeep: calm down
Ziigmund: im f tilt
Ziigmund: and u look like a f ag
BeepBeepImaJeep: hahahah
On his Two Plus Two account he posted a comment on 20th October saying that he was actually looking for a coach! This demonstrates better than anything else the sheer speed of his rise to the cream of the cash action and while some may suggest that variance will eventually catch up with the Quebec native, we will certainly have fun railing him along the way.