Phil Laak storms out of WSOP, Jennifer Tilly worries what happened

Written by Robert Johnson

Sunday, 08 July 2007

Phil "The Unabomber" Laak walked out the side service entrance after being eliminated from the WSOP when he was eliminated by Jerome Bradpiece. The board ran out A-K-5-K-x and Bradpiece won the pot with A-K.

Phil Laak mucked his hand as he headed to the rail, on the first hand of the day he folded pocket kings.â€¨â€¨He snuck out the side service entrance, saying something about, "No more bad beats".

Jennifer Tilly was playing at a nearby table and stopped by to see what happened but he was gone already. What an exit!

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Phil Laak is well known in the poker world as one of the most expressive professional players. Living in San Francisco, raised in Wellesley, Mass, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in mechanical engineering. Laak has worked as a repo man, a day trader, an engineer, and a real estate investor before entering professional poker.

Laak won the World Poker Tour Celebrity Invitational in February 2004, and has made two other WPT final tables since then. At the 2005 World Series of Poker, Johnny Chan won his tenth bracelet leaving Laak to take second place in the $2,500 Pot Limit Hold’em event.

At the inaugural William Hill Poker Grand Prix, Laak took home the 150,000 pound first prize after defeating Ram Vaswani. Laak has also appeared at numerous Poker Royale series, and won the weekly prize on NBC’s Poker After Dark against Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Antonio Esfadiari, Erik Seidel, and Jennifer Harman.

Laak is widely known for his antics and his hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, which have given him the nickname “The Unabomber”. When Laak sits at the table, hood up, glasses on, he rather resembles the forensic sketch of Theodore Kaczynski, known publicly as the Unabomber.

During stressful hands, Phil Laak is known to pull on the drawstrings of his hood, often leaving nothing but his sunglasses showing. Laak also performs celebrations after winning large hands, sometimes doing pushups, or running behind the dealer to see which cards will turn up next.

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