Chris Ferguson – Poker Jesus

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We’ve all heard the proverb cautioning against never playing poker with a man named Doc, well how about one who is named Jesus?

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson got his holy nickname due to his long, brown hair and beard, said to resemble the famous fisherman from Galilee, even though Christ was never known to perpetually sport a jet black Full Tilt Stetson. The hat and sunglasses he’s known for came about in the early days as a way to disguise the fact that he was a college student when he was playing in card rooms and casinos.

And though he’s never been known to walk on water, Ferguson has been known to perform miracles sitting at a poker table.

Los Angeles born and raised to parents who both hold doctoral degrees in mathematics, you could say the mathematical aspects of playing poker such as calculating estimated value, pot odds and counting outs are most likely encoded in his DNA.

Further tipping the odds in his favor is the fact that Ferguson has a doctorate degree of his own — in computer science — although it took him 18 years to achieve it; 5 years as an undergraduate and 13 years as a grad student at UCLA.

But all those years at the university is where he honed his skills as a poker player, playing in chat rooms, the earliest form of online poker known as the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, beginning in 1989. Although it was only for play money, to Ferguson it was a lot of fun and he admitted to spending a lot of his college time playing in those virtual poker rooms.

He has said that he always had a knack for remembering cards and figuring out odds and that by the time he was 10 he was able to beat his older brother’s friends at poker. During high school he was part of a regular group of 20 who would get together to play on the weekends.

But it wasn’t until 1994 that he decided to become a great poker player, though not necessarily a professional. The next year he entered to World Series of Poker for the first time, yet it would only be after obtaining his degree in 1999 and leaving UCLA that his play took off.

The next 5 years he racked up a record of seven WSOP final tables and finished in the money in 12 events. His first WSOP bracelet came in 2000 in the $2.5K Seven-Card Stud event and that same year he took down the Main Event for $1.5 million. Another WSOP bracelet followed in 2001 in the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo Split event. In 2003, he earned 2 more in the $2K Omaha Hi/Lo Split event, followed by the $2K Limit Hold ‘em & Seven-Card Stud event.

When asked how much of poker is luck, Ferguson had this to say: “The longer you play, the less luck is a factor. A single hand of poker is about 99 percent luck. After eight hours of playing, it is about 88 percent luck. Over a year, it is 10 percent luck. And, over a lifetime, perhaps only one percent is luck.”

Chris Ferguson also recruited and led the team of programmers who built the software for the online poker site Full Tilt Poker, of which he has part interest.