Poker Player Profile on Yevgeniy Timoshenko

Poker News - July 6, 2009 - Written by Bruce

Yevgeniy Timoshenko has proven at the young age of 21 that he is one of the top online and live poker players in the world. After years of incredible online success Timoshenko recently won arguably the most pretigious poker tournament in the world today. Only two months after turning 21, Yevgeniy won the $25,000 buy in World Poker Tour World Championships which was held at the Bellagio. This impressive victory earned him $2.1 million. The young poker prodigy was born in the Ukraine in 1988. When he was ten years old his family immigrated to the United States settling in Mukilteo, Washington. He still calls Mukilteo home to this day. When he watched Greg Raymer win the 2004 WSOP Main Event he was drawn to the game and began playing free poker games on Yahoo. This was how the young phenom learned the game and so began his poker career.

After playing around with Yahoo poker he opened an account on the online poker site UltimateBet. He played a ton of play chip tournaments which eventually earned him enough frequent player points to begin playing the "Ultimate Points" ring game or cash game tables. He first started playing stud poker and then moved on to limit hold'em. After some time he finally cashed in a freeroll tournaments which put $6 in his account. Next he played in a small buy in multi table tournament and won it for $300. With this he continued playing limit hold'em tables and quickly began to dominate his opponents. He put his winnings into another online poker site, PartyPoker, and within a short time frame he had won thousands of dollars. He was finding great success at the $15/30 limit hold'em tables. He beat this game for quite a while before transitioning to a multi table tournament specialist. He opened up a poker account on Pokerstars under the name Jovial Gent. He is still well known on the site today as one of top high stakes players. He found amazing success on Pokerstars winning the $100 rebuy tournament for $30,000, the insanely tough Sunday $200 rebuy for a cool $60,000, and then made the final table of the huge Sunday Million field placing 5th for over $59,000. His biggest online achievement was yet to come though as in November of 2006 he won the Sunday Million $500 buy in special for a whopping $250,000. He followed up these great results and went on to win the biggest tournaments on nearly all the sites. By 2008 he had won over $1,000,000 in online tournament winnings. He had now made a name for himself as one the elite online poker players and was determined to prove he could find equal success in the live arena as well.

When he was 19 years old he began playing in live tournaments. He quickly found success as he won his first major tournament that he cashed in which was a $1,000 buy in No Limit Hold'em event at the 2007 Paddy Power Irish Open in Dublin earning him $166,000. He followed this up with other successful tournament cashed all over Europe and in Australia. In the United States you have to be 21 to play the live events, so Timoshenko took his skills overseas and dominated the European circuit in the meantime. Next he traveled to Asia and won the Asian Poker Tour's Maccau event for over $500,000. Not satisfied, he traveled to Barcelona, Spain finishing second in an event for $134,000. As his bankroll continued to increase, Timoshenko next played in the 2008 World Series of Poker Europe and finished third in a preliminary event for another $100,000. After raking in millions before turning 21, Timoshenko finally was eligible to play here in the United States. He came into the final table with twice as many chips as his closest opponent and proceeded to dominate his final table opponents on his way to winning the $25,000 WPT Championship event in April of 2009. This victory earned him $2.1 and solidified Timoshenko as a major force in the poker world. There is no doubt this feared player will be one of the top players in the game for years to come.