Jeff Hwang is an expert blackjack player, a semi-professional poker player, a columnist for Card Player magazine, and the best-selling author of Pot-Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy and Advanced Pot-Limit Omaha Volumes I, II, and III. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis with degrees in both finance and management, Jeff is also an investment writer/analyst and a long-time contributor to The Motley Fool/Fool.com, a multi-media financial services company.
Jeff has been an advantage player since 1999, when he took an interest in blackjack and started hitting up the cruise ships off the coast of Florida near his hometown of Ft. Lauderdale. Shortly after graduating from college in 2003, Jeff began covering the gaming industry stocks for The Motley Fool, where his highly regarded work on the gaming industry in general and the regional gaming markets in particular has led to an appearance in Cigar Aficionado, as well as in publications as geographically diverse as the Las Vegas Business Press, Macau Business, and the Baton Rouge Business Report. At the same time, Jeff also picked up poker, and began playing regularly on the riverboats in his adopted home of St. Louis.
Jeff's interest in blackjack, poker, and the gaming industry has led him to visit virtually every commercial casino in the United States, and has given him an intimate knowledge of the riverboat casinos unrivaled in the financial media. Meanwhile, the time spent playing poker primarily on the riverboats of Missouri, Mississippi, and Indiana provided the impetus for Jeff's first book, Pot-Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy, which was released in December 2007.
In March 2008, Jeff was enlisted by Card Player magazine to write a regular column on Omaha poker, and -- given his background as an investment analyst -- bankroll management as well. And thanks in large part to the success of both the column and the book, Jeff has quickly established himself as the world's leading authority on Omaha poker.
In August 2008, in an effort to dive deeper into the gaming industry, Jeff made the move to Las Vegas and enrolled in the MBA/MS in Hotel Administration program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In November of that year, in a partnership of mutual interests with North Carolina-based PokerTek, Jeff began hosting a regular small-stakes PLO game on PokerTek’s PokerPro electronic poker tables in the fully-automated poker room at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. And on November 20th, 2008, Jeff hosted the official kickoff event at Excalibur with a lineup featuring Lyle Berman -- a 3-time World Series of Poker gold bracelet winner, as well as Chairman of PokerTek, Lakes Entertainment, and World Poker Tour Enterprises -- and David Sklansky, a 3-time WSOP bracelet winner, as well as perhaps the most influential poker author ever.
And in July 2009, in concert with poker room management at The Venetian, Jeff brought small-stakes live PLO to fruition in Las Vegas by starting a regular $1-$2 blind game with a $5 bring-in and $500 max buy-in. That game has since become the longest-running PLO game in Las Vegas in the post-Moneymaker era.
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