OMGClayAiken is 3rd on the list of biggest poker winners tracked by HighstakesDB. The data is based on 527842 hands played and his total cash game profits amount to $9,665,847.
Phil Galfond is an American poker professional born in 1985 in North Potomac, Maryland. He started playing online poker for fun as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He deposited $50 and began with $5 sit-n-go’s on PartyPoker. He slowly transitioned to cash games and has become one of the all time biggest winners in online poker.
Phil’s poker career began like many other pros his age with a small deposit into his online poker account. After playing a few sit-n-go’s, he began to look deeper into the strategy of the game. His hard work would not go unrewarded as he began to grind out a profit. It didn’t take long for him to climb the stakes and eventually he was a fixture at the highest sit-n-go’s that PartyPoker offered at the time.
It was after a conversation with one of his friends that he decided to transition to cash games. He started at $5/$10 NL where he experienced a moderate level of success. He took his first shot at $300/$600 NLHE with a $400k bankroll against Phil Ivey. In a memorable hand, Ivey flopped a higher set than Galfond and took a large portion of his bankroll at the time.
Phil's popularity increased when he was the only player excluded from Tom Dwan's challenge. Tom’s respect for Phil as a player coupled with their friendship were both factors in excluding him from the challenge.
Phil recorded his biggest winning day in online poker when he won a staggering $1.6 million in March 2010 against Victor “Isildur1” Blom. Partly as a result of the inability to get action at his main games, Galfond spent time learning 2-7 triple draw. He would go on to lose nearly $1.7 million which he chalks up to “paying his tuition.”
Although predominantly a cash game player, Phil can be seen playing a few events during the WSOP. He has over $1 million in tournament winnings, most of which came when he won the $5k PLO re-buy event pocketing $817,781 along with the gold bracelet.
Phil is regarded by many fellow pros as one of the best PLO players in the world. At the end of 2012, Phil launched RunItOnce.com, a poker training site where he and other poker professionals offer training videos to their subscribers.