Chris Tryba

If you’ve ever played at a poker tournament in North America, you’ve more than likely been close to veteran Chris Tryba. The Nevada resident has been booking wins at live tournaments since 2003, and every single one of them has taken place on home turf. He is a member of the WSOP bracelet-winner club after he took down the $2,500 Mixed Limit/No Limit Hold’em event in 2012 for $210,107. To claim the gold, he had to steer past a final table that included poker legend Phil Ivey and big Canadian winner Erik Cajelais.

Tryba’s ability to play all forms of poker has been demonstrated by his numerous deep runs in a variety of formats. He has made three other WSOP final tables aside from his bracelet win. One of these was in 2010, where he finished seventh in the $1,500 Seven Card Stud Hi/Lo 8-or-Better event. A year on, he made it down to the final nine once more in a Stud event – this time in the bigger $10,000 tournament. Belonging to the older generation of players with which this poker variant is more popular, Chris proved that Seven Card Stud might just be his speciality as he made a third final table in the $1,500 event in 2017.

Aside from his WSOP accomplishments, Tryba has caught a collection of other six-figure scores in the live arena. All of these have come in deep-stacked events, one of which he won in 2011 in Atlantic City at the $1,500 event at Borgata.

Along with his live tournament earnings of around $2,000,000, Chris scooped another half-a-million dollars in the online world before Black Friday struck in 2011. He most often played under the screenname ‘indariva’ at Full Tilt or as ‘in_da_riva’ on PokerStars.

An outspoken character on Twitter, Chris was behind a hilarious video that he created during the back-and-forth between Mike Dentale and Cate Hall that culminated in a heads-up grudge match between the pair. You can see it here and read more about the Dentale-Hall Twitter feud in this article.