Paul Phillips achieved huge financial success as a top executive for an Internet company during the Internet stock boom and has been nicknamed "Dot Com" by fellow players as a result. He is known as a talkative and aggressive player who is often involved in big pots and who possesses a vast knowledge of the game as well as an uncanny knack for reading his opponents.

He became interested in poker during college when a programming buddy discovered his love of blackjack. They went out to play poker and, as Paul says, "I never recovered."

Because Paul earned his start-up poker bankroll through his job with an Internet company, interviewers constantly focus on that aspect of his biography. He believes that if people, and especially other poker pros, are consequently given the impression his poker playing skills are less than first rate, it can only help him.

Paul has this to say about his activity in online poker forums: "I've been active in online discussion of all kinds since I first discovered bulletin boards fifteen years ago. As poker came to dominate my life, it came to dominate my online discussion time too. I enjoy the process of articulating my opinions because it is through that process that I sharpen my thinking. I also enjoy authoring the occasional flame when people take poorly thought-out positions."

Paul has an online blog, http://extempore.livejournal.com, which he describes as follows: "I started writing in my blog because it's immune to imposters and because I thought it'd be a relief to only be read by those who went out of their way to read me. That latter goal didn't quite happen since it's still read by plenty of people who openly hate me, but I guess that's the price of being high profile.

I'm glad people read it and participate in it. It's a compliment anytime someone wants to spend their time writing in my personal journal as opposed to a general purpose poker forum. I'm sure its popularity is a result of the dearth of quality alternatives as much as anything else."

While Paul is pleased that televised poker seems to have given the game a newfound respectability, he does worry that the shows mislead new players because viewers are shown a lot of all-in play and not much of what goes on in between the televised hands.

Paul has insightful words for how great poker players become champions. "By far, the most important part of my development was the decision to critically, honestly, uncompromisingly analyze my own play. In many ways, poker isn't that difficult to get good at, but if you can't admit that some aspect of your play is hurting your results, then you cannot improve. And there's a huge difference between rationalizing your plays and critiquing them. If you can't think of any mistakes you made at the end of a tournament, then you're either the greatest player in history or you're not being honest. Any time I see someone complaining about how lucky someone or everyone else is, I know they haven't turned this corner."