Hoyt Corkins

55-year old Corkins is one of the old-school poker players who has managed to come to terms with the games modern-world – his return to the green felt co-inciding with the Moneymaker-effect boom of 2003.

Almost always dressed immaculately at the table, black cowboy hat and shirt plus Blue Shark Optic sunglasses to the fore, Corkins has amassed over $5 million in tournament earnings in a career which spans several decades.

Coupled with his 2 WSOP bracelets and 2 WPT title wins, his impressive resume and difficult to face playing style has earned him several nicknames besides his usual ‘Alabama Cowboy’ moniker.

Phil Hellmuth labelled him ‘Mr All-in’ after being subjected to his aggressive ‘anti-small-ball’ technique, while others have labelled him ‘Nightmare’ on account of his sophisticated short-and medium-stack play.

His commitment to studying how players and play has changed, and adapting his style to suit is one of the main reasons Corkins has managed to stay competitive despite the influx of new players over the past decade.

“If you want to keep playing poker, then you have to learn to win,” he explained in his WPT BootCamp Bio.  “You can’t just keep losing all the time and losing all your money.  So the game itself forces you to be better. I think the love of the game is what makes you good.”

His poker-playing started relatively late, at 18, and his he sneaked into his first Vegas casino a year later. After marriage and divorce he disappeared from the Vegas poker scene for many years, although he could sometimes be found playing in the Mississippi casinos when he wasn’t raising cattle for a living.

Corkins believes that ‘money-management’ combined with a deep love for the game is at the heart of a successful poker career.

“It’s very important,” he claims, “because a lot of people who are good enough to win, or good enough to break even and continue to enjoy the game, might not be able to do that if they don’t have good money management.”

 On the subject of enjoying the game, he says wistfully, “You can’t just keep losing all the time and losing all your money.  So the game itself forces you to be better. I think the love of the game is what makes you good.”

Having won his first gold bracelet in 1992 in the $5K PLO event for $96,000 he repeated the feat 15 years later, taking down the $2.5K NLHE 6-handed event. His prize of $515,065 showed how much the poker world had changed in the intervening years, even allowing for inflation and his total WSOP earnings account for some $1.6million of his career total.

His return to the game in 2003 had seen him win a then-record $1,089,200 in that years WPT World Poker Finals, and in this year’s WSOP he proved he still has the necessary skills and energy to compete with the modern-day pros, taking 9th spot in the $1500 NLHE Monster Stack event for $117,092.