Famous Poker Players: Greg Raymer

f you would be interested in getting to know the most colorful famous poker players, perhaps you can't get any better than Greg Raymer. For starters, let's just say that Raymer is, well, larger than most other professional poker players. In fact, one might suspect that he has found a magic poker winning formula that requires him to feed his mind with copious amounts of jelly doughnuts and cheese fries.

Then there are those hideous glasses he always wears. They are mirror glasses that make it look like he peers at the world through gold coins. Many professional poker players wear sunglasses to hide their facial expressions of course, but these are strange and creepy glasses. As a matter of fact, they are 3-D hologram lizard glasses! Fittingly, he bought them from a gift shop selling merchandise for the Tower of Terror ride at Disney MGM Studios in Disneyworld down in Orlando. He thought it would be funny to wear them to his first World Series of Poker event in 2002. Instead, he found out that those glasses can freak out some opponents so much that they fold or get distracted--so they have become a permanent part of his poker wardrobe.

Oh, and Greg Raymer is The Fossilman. In the mid-1990s when he was first getting seriously into poker (blackjack had always been his game before, and he never tried to make a profession out of it), the now-former patent attorney reached an agreement with his wife that he was allowed to have a $1,000 bankroll for poker, and that money was separate from his and their income, savings, and investments. As long as he won at poker, that money was totally his and he had full control over what to do with it. But, if he ever blew his bankroll completely, he had to quit poker forever. About a year later Raymer went to a rock and mineral show in San Diego with his wife (they lived there at the time). He was taken by an orthoceras fossil and on top of that he thought it would be an excellent card protector. He played poker at the Oceanside Card Club at the time and many of the other players thought he had a great idea, too, so he decided to buy up more fossils and sell them to other players at a profit--in order to increase his poker bankroll so he could get into bigger games. Greg still uses and sells orthoceras and ammonite fossils. (What a businessman!)

But the fact is that The Fossilman has been a highly respected name among professional poker players since he won the Main Event at the World Series of Poker in 2004. Proving that he was not just some lucky guy (and he did have luck go his way at the WSOP in 2004), he made it deep into the WSOP again in 2005 and it become a strong possibility that was going to pull off the near miracle of winning back-to-back WSOP Main Events, before Lady Luck decided to turn against him where she had smiled upon him the year before. He still finished 25th out of 5,600 top professional entrants. Not too shabby.

Raymer is actually a kind-hearted and generous man who has been a great poker ambassador. He considers himself to still be constantly learning the game and he loves to teach others how to play better. Since 2004 The Fossilman has been a member of Team pokerstars online, which also includes: Chris Moneymaker, Tom McEvoy, Greg Raymer, Wil Weaton, Isabelle Mercier, and Evelyn Ng. Not a bad group of famous poker players to learn from online.

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