Who are the UK’s top poker players?

The rise of poker online at sites like Gentlemanspoker.com has meant that more people in the UK than ever before are playing the game, but despite this there will always be those players who are that bit better than the rest in any country. These are the poker faces which no one participating in one of the bigger online poker tournaments will relish coming up against, so for reference’ sake, here are those top players.

Tom Bentham

This player, who hails from Kent, makes a living playing professionally in online high stakes tournaments and recently won £20,000 at the Heads-Up Championship held in London. Bentham plays online poker under the handle of ‘tjbentham,’ and has succeeded in making a very good living for himself as a professional poker player with the ratings at the Poker Table site indicating that he has won around $500,000 from the last 92,000 hands of Texas Hold ‘Em poker that he has played.

Alan Clarke

This player, who goes by the slightly cheesy nickname of ‘clarkatroid’, is one of the older players to have made a name for himself during the online poker era proving that experience can be very useful when it comes to a game such as poker. His success is based on his ability to keep going during long online matches and he focuses his attention on cash games. Indeed, when it comes to making money playing poker professionally Clarke may actually be doing better than virtually everyone else, but he has opted to remain low-key by focusing on this rather than trophy success and celebrity.

Greg Howard

Howard plays professionally online under the handle ‘gregior’ and is considered to be one of the UK’s finest MTT players. He enjoyed a particularly fine year in 2008 after having risen to prominence the previous year when he won $79,000 at the Full Tilt. In 2008 he went on to win in excess of £1 million at the poker tournaments including victories at the PokerStars $100 Re-Buys, the FT $65k GTD within a remarkable 48-hour period.