My 10 Most Influential Poker Players

In this blog post, I am going to share with you (in no particular order) 10 pros who had a huge impact on my poker career. Some were private coaches and I battled others on the felt, but all left a positive lasting impression on me.

David Benefield

David "Raptor" Benefield was my first online poker friend. I used to lurk on an old poker forum and one day I posted that I was "jcardshark", the unknown guy who was tearing up the $215 buy-in sit n' go's on PartyPoker. David, one of the most popular online players of the time, messaged me and asked if I wanted to talk strategy on AIM, which of course I did. We became great friends and talked through AIM basically every day for three years while we grinded the sit n' go's. David was one of the first people to do what was thought to be impossible: play 4 tables at the same time. I quickly followed suit. He then moved to 16 tables and I did the same. I seemed to always be one step behind him, but that was fine because he was (and still is) ten steps ahead of everyone else. 
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