Ylon Schwartz
Many people think that all successful players in poker achieved success instantly and unexpectedly. In the case of New York native Ylon Schwartz, success in poker is not a snap-your-fingers-and-get-your-wish thing. Before becoming a premier poker player in the first decade of the twenty-first century, he was a regular guy with different odd jobs and a liking for the game of poker.
He has been playing for over fifteen years already, and poker is not his only game. Ylon Schwartz is also a chess master, which gives him an advantage in poker because he is quite capable of anticipating possible moves and outcomes ahead of time, so he can strategize pretty well. He also is a backgammon player, which is another game that requires you to have good strategic skills in order to succeed. Outside of the game, he took on many different jobs before he played poker full-time. He sold Broadway tickets at one point, and he was a child actor when he was younger, and these are only two of the long list of jobs that he took on before finally embracing poker as a full-time activity. It was during this time of transition that he debuted on the professional poker tournament scene, in 1998, when he joined the US Poker Championship and finished third.
He stopped and went back to the tournament scene in 2004, after the death of his mother the year before, whom he took care of when she was diagnosed with cancer. Things went fairly well with him after that. He made quite a number of money finishes and built up his bankroll as well as his reputation as a poker player to watch out for in the four years that followed his return. It took that entire decade since his first tournament, however, for him to get to where he became very famous – the 39th World Series of Poker, which was held in 2008. While he did not win first place at the No Limit Hold’em Championship, he did place fourth, taking home the prize that brought him to the spotlight – $3,774,974. That cemented his place among the respected poker players of today. He continues to build up his bankroll, and as of 2009 he has more than $4.1 million in his bankroll.