Hevad Khan
If you’ve ever wondered why a loud celebration of your victory is considered to be unethical in poker tables, then your answer is Hevad Khan. Here is a guy who is rather infamous for quite unpleasant reasons – he is very aggressive, both in his game and as a person, and he is boisterous, up to the point that he offends his fellow players at the table. It was because of him that, in 2008, instead of observing quiet celebrations as part of the unspoken ethics at the tables, the World Series of Poker made the rule official: no boisterous celebrations and scandalous actions are to be made in celebration of a victory. This is known, to this day, as the Hevad Khan rule.
Yet even with this negative press surrounding Hevad Khan, he is also known for his outstanding poker strategy. At the age of twenty-four, he is already among the lineup of the biggest poker players in the world today. He only began playing in professional tournaments in 2007, making his debut at the 38th Annual World Series of Poker, where he placed in a number of events and won a combined total of $976,498. His biggest win so far is close to this number, as he won the Caesars Palace Classic the year after his superb performance at the WSOP. He took home a solid $1 million for their No Limit Hold’em Championship.
His competitive nature truly rears its head. After all, he began competing at the tournaments for StarCraft before moving on to poker. Today, with three first place finishes and twenty-two cashes, and a total of over $2.5 million in winnings, Hevad Khan does not need to make friends – he just needs to keep winning, and he’ll be just fine with his reputation in the poker world.