Olivier Busquet

Born on August 22 1981 in New York City, Olivier Busquet started his ventures into the competitive world at the tender age of six. He learned to play chess from his father and before long he was travelling the country playing tournaments. He played for a while, but after entering the high school, he focused more on sports where he managed to have very noticeable results in both track running and basketball. His hard work and great results during high school education opened a place for him at the Cornell University. His initial intention was to major in mathematics, but he ended up graduating with a degree in philosophy instead. After finishing his formal education, he worked on the Wall Street for a few years and during this period he got introduced to poker home games. He immediately liked the game and started playing online. It was not long before he started playing the highest stakes cash games available. He took somewhat unorthodox approach to learning, as he would challenge some of the best poker players to play against him. Although this has probably proven to be an expensive course in poker, he believed that the best way to learn was to play against the people who were better than him. Strategy and competition were the parts of poker that came naturally to Busquet, but bankroll management, tilt control and game selection have proven to be quite a challenge. It took some time and some losses before he eventually found his comfort zone, after which he became the first player to profit $1,000,000 in online sit and go tournaments. Just recently, Busquet fired up quite a discussion in the online poker community when he made a statement via his tweeter that online poker was chess while live poker was checkers. This prompted comments from many well-known players like Daniel Negreanu and started up a really big thread on the 2+2 forum, with people defending their positions with all sorts of arguments. He did say eventually that his statement was perhaps misunderstood and tried to explain more what he was getting at with it. As for his live results, the biggest one came quite early in his career when he won 2009 WPT Borgata Open Event for $925,000, followed by his EPT Monte Carlo High Roller runner-up finish worth nearly $800k. His tournament winnings total $4.2 million, and his other notable poker achievements include two WSOP final table finishes. He also came third in the $25k WCOOP online heads-up event. As for his WPT win, he said it was a dream come true for him.