PokerTube Presents: Joe Ingram aka ‘ChicagoJoey’

9 years ago
PokerTube Presents: Joe Ingram aka ‘ChicagoJoey’
21:56
21 Sep

If you are the fan of great poker podcasts with quality guests and interesting content then there is absolutely no way that you don’t know who ‘ChicagoJoey’ is. But if you have somehow missed it, we give you Joe Ingram – as he lives and breathes.

Life – On and Off the Felt

‘ChicagoJoey’ has been a part of PokerTube and PokerVIP team for some time now and recently he’s actually created a thread on PokerVIP explaining his life path and how he went from being a successful online grinder to becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world of poker podcasts (although, as he admits himself, the competition is not that fierce).

Discovering online poker back in 2008, Joey was immediately hooked up, as was the case with many of his generation. Natural talent, he quickly started 24-tabling full ring NLHE which was, by itself, a big challenge – but clearly not big enough. To spice the things up, ‘ChicagoJoey’ started offering prop bets which saw him really pushing the envelope.

His very first prop bet saw him playing 603K hands in a month period – a record he believes still stands for the full ring games. The next year he went further and started the challenge that saw him playing 50,000 hands in 20 hours – and making profit. This was a big one.

Ingram earned upwards of $30,000 from ‘naïve’ bettors who believed that he would fail and, perhaps even more importantly, this made him kind of famous. We say ‘kind of’ because fame in the world of online poker is somewhat obscure term. But many people learned about who he was and what he did.

People will always hate, I might talk crap back to them and most of them are bad at poker and living a bad life. They are jealous and have nothing better to do, so against those people I’ll talk crap.

In an old interview he did for PokerTableRatings, Joe described winning the bet as ‘the best feeling from doing anything in my life ever’. During that interview, he unveiled a lot about his character as well. Asked about haters, he basically shrugged it off, stating that people will always be jealous, and no matter how good you do, they will always find a reason to talk crap about you.

After the Black Friday hit, Joe took one of his sickest prop bets to date. At that time he was living in Vancouver, having to relocate from San Diego, and took upon himself to make it to Supernova Elite status on Poker Stars within a timeframe of only 2.5 months. Once again, he was successful.

Soon after that, by his own admittance, things started taking a turn for worse. Poker-wise, things were going well, but he started dabbling with drugs and things escalated quickly.

I met a girl in Spain who took me to my first music festival. I went back to Canada for a month and won 250k in a couple of weeks and to celebrate I decided to get a bit too addicted into raging/drugs and over the next couple months while in Vancouver and living in Sydney I lost most of the money I had online (oops). I remember after a winning session I finally broke 500k in my account and a couple weeks later I had to redeposit

Luckily for Joey (and all of us enjoying his podcasts), he was able to turn the things around and rededicate himself to poker and really expand his knowledge (in poker and generally speaking), in his words – ‘I have been able to study/learn more things in a 8 month time period than in my previous 27 years (basketball, dancing,cooking, piano, guitar, yoga, food, web coding)’. All these new interests eventually led to poker podcasts, centered around Pot Limit Omaha, with main focus on trying to get more people interested and involved with this poker variation.

‘ChicagoJoey’ Podcasts

Apart from bringing more people to the game, he had a goal to offer PLO regs something to keep them entertained, as there wasn’t (and still isn’t really) that much out there focusing on PLO. He’s already had some contacts in the community, having played for so long, but he also made numerous new friends who were and still are welcome guests in his different podcasts.

With time, naturally, his field of interest has expanded to encompass more than just PLO, and with it the audience that his podcasts attract. For example, just recently he volunteered to do a live commentary on Isildur1 and Gus Hansen match together with Brian Hastings, and followed through, although the match itself did not take place as planned.

Still, deep and insightful analysis and capability to enter the minds of players are what really made Joe’s podcasts stand out and this is what the bunch at 2 + 2 can never get enough and always asks for moar.

But ‘ChicagoJoey’ is not out of the game – he is still playing and he is still winning. Podcasts are just his way of expanding his poker views and getting himself out there. He admits that his goals are somewhat selfish, but in all honesty, most things anybody does are selfish to some extent. Joe admits that he wants to gain more exposure and visibility, but in doing so he is giving us all great content and masterful insight into the mind of a poker player. I’d dare call it more than a fair trade!

His passion for probets is still going strong and his latest one saw him taking action that he would go from $3k to $20 million play chips on Poker Stars within 24 hours. He thought this was going to be a piece of cake, but some red flags started going in his head when he quickly booked $16K in action - $16,000 of real, spendable money. This time, the legend failed – and it was $16k down the drain, but nothing player with his propensity to propbets would sweat over too much.

That’s Chicago Joey in a nutshell. If you want to ask him a question, he frequents his thread on PokerVIP forum, and if you want to enjoy his podcasts, we have plenty of them on PokerTube with many more to come! Feel free to stop by and say hi, or even make a suggestion for what you want to see more (or less) in his podcasts and maybe you will be granted your wish!


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Ivan Potocki is the editor in chief and one of the lead news writers for PokerTube. His natural flair and enthusiasm for journalism combined with a deep poker knowledge make him an exciting contributor for PokerTube.The experience garnered playing poker professionally for several years and the knowl...Read more

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