Poker Legends Antonio Esfandiari & Phil Laak Monday @ 7pm ET on Trend Success
November 16, 2009
Mondays at 7pm EST
Antonio Esfandiari: When he was 9 years old his family moved to San Jose, California. At the age of 19, he changed his name to Antonio which was adopted from living in a Mexican American community in San Jose, and became a professional magician.
While he was performing magic, he was invited to a game of Texas Hold ‘em and started to play poker. In 2004, he won close to $1.4 million at the Commerce Casino.He won his first World Series of Poker bracelet a few months later in Pot-Limit Texas Hold ‘em. Esfandiari appeared in the second and third seasons of the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament. After finishing dead last the previous year, Antonio was able to redeem himself with an impressive 2nd place finish the third season. He was also in each season of GSN series High Stakes Poker and each season of NBC Poker After Dark.
While touring the poker circuit, he often shares a room with Phil Laak. He is also known for his chip trick techniques.As of 2009, his total live tournament winnings exceed $3,400,000. Esfandiari co-starred in the TV show, I Bet You, on MOJO HD with Phil Laak. He is also the face of World Poker Tour’s Poker-Made Millionaire.
Philip “Phil” Laak: Early life Laak was born in Dublin, raised on the East Coast, and now lives in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked as an engineer, a repo man, a stock day trader, a gardener and a real estate investor, prior to getting into open poker games in California.
At the 200
7 conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia, Laak and fellow professional player Ali Eslami competed against, and beat, Polaris, a poker playing computer program developed at the University of Alberta, in two of the four rounds with the remaining rounds being a loss and a draw. As of 2008, his total live tournament winnings exceed $1,750,000. Laak has written a monthly column called “Being Phil Laak” in the poker-themed Bluff Magazine since late 2005. Laak co-hosted a show called “I Bet You” on the (MOJO network) with his friend
Laak became known widely in the poker scene as the “Unabomber” because of the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses he wears at the table, making him resemble the forensic sketch of Theodore Kaczynski who was known as the Unabomber.
Laak is known also for his unusual and inventive manner of speech. He coined the poker term “felted” to mean having lost all of one’s chips. He is currently dating actress Jennifer Tilly, who won a WSOP bracelet in 2005 in the $1,000 buy-in Ladies no limit Texas hold ‘em championship.
Trend Success
Success is defined in a myriad of ways, but usually it’s defined by each of us 
individually. If we go to college to get a PhD in Psychology and we achieve that goal, then it’s a success; if we grow up wanting to change the world by becoming an elected official and we are a US Senator now, then it’s a success; or if we were poor growing up and swore that one day we’d achieve the American Dream and be able to tell our rags to riches story…that might be one person’s idea of success.
For me, Michael Parness, I just wanted to eat Shrimp. We didn’t have a lot growing up and when we went out to restaurants, which wasn’t often, me and my siblings were usually confined to the side of the menu that didn’t include Shrimp, Lobster or Steak. I swore when I grew up I’d be able to eat as much shrimp as possible. Of course, once I achieved that goal successfully, I then had other dreams and other goals.
Success, after all, is all in the perception. We’ll deal with those issues, and more on – Trend Success.
