Unofficial site about Howard Lederer

• Howard Lederer was born in New Hampshire on October 30 1964.
• He has two sisters, poker pro Annie Duke and author Kay Lederer who wrote an expose on the Lederer family entitled Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.
• Howard Lederer stands 6 feet 5 inches tall.
• He is married to Suzie and has a son Mattias.
• Currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

After showing considerable talent as a chess and backgammon player, Lederer was introduced to poker in a New York City chess club where he played after graduating high school. Although he had planned to attend Columbia after taking a year off to play poker, this plan never eventuated and the game became his full-time profession.

From a full-time devotion to poker in New York City, Lederer moved to Las Vegas in 1993 to improve his game, where he has lived ever since.

Between 1987 and 2008 he has competed in 46 tournament events, placing first in 7 of these and in the top five in 12 more.

The Professor only plays online at Full Tilt Poker, chat with him after you get the best $600 bonus with a Full Tilt Poker referral code.

Lederer’s most recent big win was in Australia on January 12th 2008 where he came first in the Aussie Millions Poker Championship ‘No Limit Hold-em’ Event with an AUD$1000 buy-in. He walked away with a whopping AUD$1.25 million (around USD$1.15 million, his biggest win to date) and 25 Player of the Year points. This brings his total earnings from wins to over USD$4.7 million.

Arguably his best wins were in 2003 when he won two World Poker Tour titles. These wins were his greatest good fortune not just for the financial gain of the events themselves but because he won these high-profile titles at a time when Texas Hold ‘Em was beginning to sweep the world. He became one of the best-known celebrity poker players when this fast, exciting form of poker was blazing like a craze-wildfire through the bars and lounge-rooms across the Western Hemisphere. Howard Lederer, also known as ‘The Professor’ thanks to his careful, studied approach to the game and other players, recognised and capitalised on the great timing of his wins and quickly began to investigate other earning streams.

His careful combination of science and intuition has proved Lederer to be an adept and astute businessman: always calculating his next move, Howard Lederer wasn’t satisfied with making a killing through poker alone. He began to turn himself into a brand outside of the game through affiliated ventures. Lederer has written a number of books - all poker-related - as well as becoming part of the Full Tilt poker team together with players such as Jennifer Harman and Erik Seidel. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Full Tilt is an online poker site that allows you to download software to test your skills against one of 77 poker pros or play live online against other players. Howard Lederer was heavily involved in Full Tilt from the beginning, helping to design and develop the website. In keeping with his books and DVDs that help others improve their game and have sold over 500,000 copies, today Full Tilt Poker is rumoured to be the highest earning and most popular poker room on the net. He also commentates poker tournaments and has signed an deal with Nintendo for an undisclosed sum (his Wii game ‘All in’ launched in 2006).

Howard Lederer - Life story

Lederer’s business savvy is in the way he sells titbits without ever giving his entire game away. His blog of the 2003 WPT events is a great insight into some of his thoughts and techniques that will help aspiring poker players to improve their own game but not to emulate his own. They don’t call him The Professor for nothing. While much has been written by Lederer and others on the human elements of playing poker, particularly the study of body language, his number one piece of advice to players is “never forget this is a mathematical game.” This obsession with the numbers involved in poker has led to Lederer being one of the biggest advocates of keeping the game legal. He is a boardmember of the Poker Players Alliance, a lobby group formed to help fight bills like those proposed by Governor Deval Patrick who wanted to make online poker playing illegal and punishable with jail time in 2006. Lederer’s main argument has always been that poker is a game of skill, unlike poker machines (or one-armed bandits) that are designed to always favour the house in the long run. Howard Lederer, in typical mild-mannered form, expressed disapproval at the idea of “70 million poker players waking up tomorrow and finding their game illegal.” Words of wisdom indeed from our favourite Professor.

• Although Lederer is a vegetarian, his competitive streak is so strong that he once ate a cheeseburger to win a $10,000 bet against poker co-player David Grey.
• Lederer is a huge fan of the Grateful Dead and has been to at least 125 of their concerts.
• During the 2005 World Series of Poker he paid $3500 for a Ghostbusters Zippo lighter belonging to Doyle Brunson.
• Howard’s father Peter Lederer taught him to play chess, backgammon and cards and was known to be extremely competitive. Lederer is quoted as saying that his father never deliberately lost a game to him, no matter how young he was.
• Although Lederer showed his sister Annie Duke how to play poker, he may be regretting it: Annie has knocked her brother out of three WSOP events and is the highest-paid woman in the history of the game.
• In her book Poker Face Katy Lederer calls her brother a two-bit losing gambler. This was at a time when Lederer was in New York City, cleaning toilets for a living and sleeping on park benches to fund poker, chess and backgammon bets. We’re sure they’ve made up since.