Yevgeniy Timoshenko

Born in 1988 and originally from Ukraine, Yevgeniy Timoshenko moved with his family to Washington State when he was ten and that’s where he grew up. He made his first poker steps during the 2003, after watching the WSOP coverage. He started playing with his high school friends and eventually found his way into online poker. He dabbled with play money to start with, but soon he made a few bucks playing freerolls and he never looked back, succeeding to build his roll without ever making a single deposit. In his own words, the biggest improvements in his game came from reviewing important hands after the sessions and figuring out the better ways to play them. This is why his best advice to new players is that, in order to get to the next level, they need to learn to think about poker themselves and develop their own game, instead of trying to mimic styles of other players. In the online community he is mostly known by his alias “Jovial Gent”. Although the name is quite intriguing, Timoshenko says that he doesn’t really know how he came up with it. He just wanted to make a bunch of online names that did not have any correlation to one another. Another quite famous one is “bballer88”. Pocketfives.com lists his winnings at over $4.7 million, and his largest online cash is impressive $1.7 million score that came from the victory in the 2009 WCOOP Main Event, a tournament that saw the turnout of more than 2,100 players. Although he sees himself as more of an online player, his live results are no less impressive. With the first really big score coming in 2008, when he won the APT $5k event to the tune of $500,000, his career winnings stand at nearly $6.8 million. His biggest prize came in 2009 after winning the $25k WPT Five Star World Poker Classic Championship event, taking home $2,150,000. Second on the list came just recently, during the February of 2014, after taking the 1st place in Aussie Millions $100k challenge, worth nearly $1.8 million. Timoshenko can’t see himself ever fully quitting poker even if it stops being his main source of income. He believes that, after devoting so much of his time and energy to the game, he will never lose the passion for it. He loves traveling and playing live, although he gets homesick if he stays away for too long. He also says that he has never been staked and that he’s never gone broke. To wrap it up, one of his really funny tweets: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your Sunday EPT sat in your first half hour at the table, it’s probably the guy one tabling it on his phone”. There are numerous videos featuring Timoshenko here on Pokertube, and these are both fun to watch and quite educational, if you do not mind his very methodical and deliberate style of play.