Phil Laak lends a very colorful presence to the poker world. Adventurous to the extreme, he is active in motorcycling, scuba diving, skydiving and judo. He was once spared serious injury during an accident when he flipped over a car, left his motorcycle behind him, and actually landed on his feet!

The culture of card playing was a part of his upbringing. His family enjoyed playing Tripoli for pennies and Phil says even then he observed a "card logic" which eventually carried over into his poker career.

Phil has a particular interest in what he calls "higher order thinking" and employs it at the table. He says he uses techniques of higher order thinking to establish a psychic connection with other players. Among those techniques are "lucid dreaming," whereby he plays hands over and over in dreams thus enabling himself to perceive other players' subconscious and conscious tells. "What I am talking about," explains Phil, "is being able to pick up information from my opponent that is neither visual nor verbal. In other words, information that would not be called a tell."

Phil first became acquainted with high stakes poker at an underground club in New York City in 1999. He took to the game as though born to it. "That was really my baptism into poker. From there, part of myself splintered off to be a part-time 'poker degeneratum.'" Not long thereafter, Phil began entering tournaments and enjoying success at them. The competition as well as the patience and need for varying strategies appealed to him, all the more when he saw there were many ways of applying higher order thinking to gain an advantage in tournaments.

If Phil has something of a reputation of a "loose cannon" on the circuit, that is balanced by his general orderliness. His wallet is impeccably kept, all bills facing the same way and arranged from smallest to largest. He achieves his poker successes without being tortured by the outcome of a hand. His philosophy is that: "Living well is all about optimizing and achieving a balance between fun, freedom and fulfillment."

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