Bryn Kenney

Bryn Kenney is currently (as of early 2018) the 9th most tournament wins, with $23,191,772 in tournament winnings. Some of this comes from the fact that since 2016 Kenney has been a regular on the high roller circuit, rarely rolling out of bed for less than a $100k buy in.

Not that it was always that way. Like many of the poker players who joined the game after the Moneymaker effect kicked in he was originally a Magic: the Gathering nerd aided by memory training pretty much from birth by his mother. 

“My mother helped to develop my memory skills really early on,” he told Cardplayer in an interview. “She told me that when I was 18 months old, she would show me baseball cards and that I was able to remember 60 different players way before I could even read. I think that did a lot to shape my brain and is a big reason why my memory is so good today.”

As “When I was 12, I was really into Magic,” he said. “I was the number one player in the world at one point. Once I turned 16, however, I realized that there wasn’t much money to be made with Magic.”

So poker was ripe to take up the slack. Starting out playing $20 buy in tournaments at his grandparents house he slowly rose up the ranks he went pro at 20 after a good run in the Bahamas but admits to being as poor at money management as is killer on the felt.

Forced back into live tournaments by Black Friday, he’s now pretty ubiquitous in the kind of high stakes events that make a splash like the $100k buy in partypoker MILLIONS event he won in 2018 which he took 5th in  and 3rd in the equivalent event at the PCA 2018.

As long as he can get staked he’ll be on our TV screens it seems.