Jamie Gold’s streak in the 2006 WSOP Main Event included knocking out Michael Binger. Binger’s pair of tens was inferior to Gold’s straight, but this happened first on the 36th level of play and Binger’s third place finish netted him more than 4 million dollars.

"Since middle school, I've always had plans to get rich," says now millionaire Michael Binger. He is not a one track mind though; the plan to get rich did not necessarily include this scenario of hitting it big in poker. Just a few months after the WSOP success, he was also rewarded for his achievements in his other domain as he became a PhD in particle physics. Good knowledge in math and probability is useful both in physics and in poker. Yet working on supersymmetry and the Higgs boson as a doctorate at Stanford and working the final table at the Rio does not have that much in common. That Binger can do both is probably credited to the fact he understands it is different. He knows enough not to get entangled in the mathematics of the game.

As Binger says: "Math is definitely in the background of poker, but it's only one part of it. A lot of players are mathematically minded, but they put too much stock in that, and so they aren't very good players. It's not an entirely mathematical game. It's not solvable by a computer, and there's not an exactly perfect model. It's based on an infinite number of variables. It's not just the odds of having the best hand, drawing the best hand, the size of the pot, or other numerical factors. There are non-numerical elements such as, "Did that guy just get beat really bad his last hand?" or "Did he just get into a fight with his girlfriend? Maybe he's aggressive now, and prone to making dumb plays." There are so many things on display during the game that you have to be watching and thinking about. "

"Playing good poker is half art and half science."

As a child Binger played ante-poker with his family and in high school he enjoyed some friendly poker with his friends, including some Seven-Card Stud during chemistry. Poker in a regular card room did not enter the picture until some influential graduate school friends did. It was small stakes in the local room, learning new games as they came along. After winning $1,000 on a good day at Lucky Chances in Colma, he tried a table with higher stakes. "I stepped into that and got killed," he says. "I realized there was more to the game than I'd known." Binger studied books on poker with the goal of winning back the $10,000 he had lost, and did so within months.

By the time of the WSOP breakthrough Binger was already a semi-pro. As a doctorate he was able to control his workload. He even took a whole year off to play poker. Some procrastination later he had managed juggle both interests. And for the future he hopes to continue his research as well as participating in the major poker tournaments that only come around about once a month. So just as "Playing good poker is half art and half science", he anticipates doing part-time poker and part-time physics. As he has, with good a turnout.