Dan Harrington

Born in Cambridge Massachusetts, Dan Harrington currently resides in Santa Monica California. He attended law School at Suffolk University and it was while he was in college that he took up poker and he is said to have been traveling to Harvard for poker games with some of the world’s richest people such as Bill Gates. It was not until in the nineteen eighties that he became a member of a poker group that used to play at the Mayfair in New York City and he soon began traveling to Las Vegas to participate in poker tournaments. It was after entering his first world poker series tournament in nineteen eighty seven that he explored his talent and at the end of it all he emerged in an impressive sixth position.

In nineteen ninety five, Dan won in a field comprising two hundred and seventy three entries, in an event that also saw him walk away with a cool million dollars having beaten some of the veteran poker players. After this event, he stayed out of the limelight for a while, he is known to shun publicity and was said to be managing his real estate business. He continued enjoying the low profile and would only participate in some low profile events, before he won the nineteen ninety six WSOP, the main event. And as if he had been honing his skills for the time that he had disappeared from the limelight, Dan resurfaced in the 2003 WSOP main event and surprised many when he beat poker greats like Howard Lederer. Freddy Deeb and David Singer.

Though he did not emerge top at the tournament, he emerged third and managed to walk away with six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The following year, he finished fourth at the WSOP main event but again walked away with one and a half million dollars. It is worth noting that in both the two events, Dan had to compete with a large number of fields, there having been eight hundred and thirty eight opponents in the year two thousand and three and with a whooping two thousand, five hundred and seventy six the following year. Having failed to capture a WPT event in 2005, Dan proved his worth in the 2007 legends of poker WPT when he went all the way to the final and proceeded to win the one point six million dollar prize.

The poker great has authored three books and they are all volumes one to three of the title Harrington On Hold’ em. The books have been said to be some of the best ever written on poker strategy and in fact countless professional poker players have touted them as one of the best ways through which to learn to begin poker. Surprisingly, Dan considers himself as a businessman first and then secondly a poker player. His overly successful investment company, Anchor Loans, consumes most of his time these days and he has a Backgammon and chess championship to his name. The veteran player has agreed to the fact that his age is slowly pushing him away from poker as the championships are draining.

Dan employs a number of the not so normal types of strategies to help him stay at the top of the other players during a specific poker game. He has been described as a wolf in sheep’s skin, as his outlook is no match for what he showcases in tournaments. Dan is known to maintain a conservative approach in the early stages of each tournament, only for him to show his aggressiveness as the game progresses. He knows exactly when to avoid slipping into the danger zones and he then starts playing more hands to prevent himself from being anted away.

He has been known to perfect the squeeze play, through pushing in more than half of his remaining chips and then committing himself to the hand. He uses well calculated mathematical approaches in order to bring down an opponent or opponents, through calculating their most likely ranges of hands before combining them with pot odds and finally evaluating his moves. He shows an awareness of the multiple styles of play which are most common among many players and the specific strategies which are employed to combat them. He describes the single most determinant for winning as being in a position to know when to go all in. His super aggressive style of play has earned him lots of respect from fellow poker players. Dan is said to have chosen his own current nick name of ‘Action’.

Posted by Joel on May 11 2010. Filed under Player Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry