Joey Ingram
About Joey Ingram
| Current Residence | Las Vegas, NV, USA |
| Born | June 24th, 1982 |
| Birth Place | Chicago, IL, USA |
| Total Winnings | $43,001 |
Joey Ingram Facts
- A massive cash game grinder on PokerStars, Joey Ingram would achieve Supernova Elite status in 2011, just before Black Friday.
- He holds numerous records for online poker hands played, including over 600,000 played in a month and 50,000 played in 24 hours - he even turned a profit during the last session!
- Joey Ingram has been close friends with Doug “WCGRider” Polk for the better part of a decade, with Polk staking Ingram to move up from $0.25/$0.50 online stakes.
| Player Score | 7.5/10 |
| Aggressiveness | 7 |
| Looseness | 8 |
| Limit | 6 |
| No-limit | 8 |
| Side Games | 9 |
| Steam Control | 7 |
| Against Strong Players | 7 |
| Against Weak Players | 9 |
| Tournaments | 6 |
| Short-Handed | 8 |
One of poker’s biggest names and most important ambassadors, Joey Ingram, has succeeded in every facet of the poker industry since his rise to prominence in the early 2010s.
Someone who has an evident passion for the game and an understanding of what keeps the poker fanbase happy, he has been a driver for positive change in all areas, whether calling out big operators for player mistreatment or investigating major cheating scandals.
Going by other aliases like “Chicago Joey” or “Papi”, Joey Ingram is a massive proponent of the Pot-Limit Omaha variant of poker, calling it the “great game.” After a rise from small-stakes grinder to high-stakes crusher in PLO on PokerStars, Black Friday forced Ingram to find new avenues to make poker a sustainable career.
He created a YouTube channel called ‘joeingram1’, and the rest is history. Joey Ingram has ingratiated himself as one of poker’s most influential figures creating engaging, informative, and important content.
Swingy Beginnings for Chicago Joey
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Joey aspired to move into the city and had a passion for sports. He stumbled upon No-Limit Hold’em online and live and began starting to play without having the game worked out.
He would encounter losses early on but remained resilient to becoming a winning poker player. He would continue to go to college and stay on the ‘normal’ life path but would spend his spare time grinding and studying in the lab to become the best poker player he could be.
Ingram would get his bankroll wiped out multiple times, but he found himself closer to gaining a significant edge online on a very juicy poker field. While his parents were concerned about his career path, he would take a final loan from them and write them a charming book on money management discipline full of assurances about how he knew what he was doing.
Joey still keeps this book, showing it to fans on streams when they were going through tough downswings themselves.
When talking about his early days, Joey told Bluff Europe in 2014 the following:
“I had no idea how to play poker, and I would run it up to a couple of thousand dollars and lose it all.
I had no idea what the strategy was. Once I turned 21, I started going to the casino. I would take all the money I made working as a waiter, and I would go and lose it all.
“Then I would borrow some money off my mom or borrow $200 off a friend, and then I would get a ride to the casino and lose it all and have to get a shuttle home.”
After putting the time in to assemble something closer to strategy, Chicago Joey would become a full-time grinder, aiming for a pure amount of ridiculous volume instead of any semblance of poker bankroll management.
In one month, he even played 604,000 online poker - one of many hand-related records that Ingram would break.
He discovered that PokerStars had wrongly awarded a different online player the record for hands played in a day, which set him on a mission. Ingram would play 50,000 hands in just 24 hours, turning an $800 profit in 25NL PLO games and winning $30,000 in prop bet money.
Joey Ingram Climbs The Poker Ladder
Black Friday left Joey in the lurch. After successfully navigating his way up to a $25/$50 PLO crusher on PokerStars, he was forced to move to Vancouver to keep his poker-playing career alive online.
He carried this on for another two years before a hiatus back to the US opened his eyes to content creation and how he could share his larger-than-life personality with the poker community.
While his content-creating career was burgeoning, he began participating in some World Series of Poker events. Despite never genuinely studying tournament poker theory, he would record two cashes and come not far off a gold WSOP bracelet; in 2016, he finished 39th in the $3,000 PLO Six-Max WSOP event, and in 2018 he would come 17th in the WSOP $10,000 PLO Championship, cashing for $28,502.
Ingram uses poker tournaments as a way to connect with the poker community rather than any poker-playing goals. He most recently played a series of poker tournaments in 2021, winning the Bally’s Power Poker Series Heads-Up event for $4,429. He even took down a $50 Recurring No-Limit Hold’em event at the Sahara!
He sporadically plays high-stakes PLO cash games across Vegas, whether in casinos like the Aria or Bellagio poker rooms or even in private games. Papi’s poker focus would turn to poker content creation after Black Friday, which turned out to be a great decision.
Chicago Joey, the Voice of The Poker People
While the birth of Ingram’s “joeingram1” YouTube channel happened in 2007, it wasn’t until 2014 before rapid growth occurred.
The world of online poker shifted dramatically after 2011. The games got harder as recreational US players were forced away from the tables, and poker operators monopolized the industry to make it less appealing for players to grind.
PokerStars crippled a lot of small and mid-stakes grinders with rakeback changes, like getting rakeback via Stars Chests. Others made it more difficult for players to grind online with poor offerings, tournament rake, and more.
Joey Ingram used his platform to speak out on these issues and began to use the poker connections he made through his grinding days to carry out fantastic in-depth interviews in his ‘Poker Life’ podcast series.
With a natural talent for commentating on or about poker, he would get invites from broadcasters and operators to help with their poker media offering. In 2017 he would go and commentate during the popular !Live a the Bike poker stream, giving his insights into a wild PLO cash game stream that was informative, entertaining, and exciting with each pot.
He would add his voice to a Doug Polk week at the same live stream, in which a cash game of Matt Berkey, Doug Polk, Dan “Jungleman” Cates, and Dan “danmerrr” Merrilees would take place. Joey showed even more talent for the microphone for poker; during these periods, his poker channel would continue to ascend to the top spot of poker content.
The Rise of Joey Ingram in Poker Media
While many poker operators could not understand what poker fans wanted to see, Joey understood immediately. He created podcasts and interviews with legendary players, which received huge acclaim and fanfare.
He has interviewed players like Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Gus Hansen, Barry Greenstein, Eli Elezra, Doug Polk, and even Luke Schwartz! On top of podcasts, he would stream himself playing online PLO to give some insights and wisdom about the great game breaking down the biggest hands of his online career.
On online poker sites, there would sometimes be high-stakes cash games brewing, like in 2017, where Rob Yong, Sam Trickett, Leon Tsoukernik, and Lazljo “omaha4rollz” Bujtas would take part. Joey had enough nous to know that poker fans would love to watch this, so he would stream the game and break down huge pots while commentating fantastically - even without the hole cards, thousands would stay and watch this poker content.
Sometimes a live-streamed cash game that reached exorbitant stakes would find its way to Chicago Joey, and he would add his analysis to create brilliant poker content. The best one that comes to mind is the partypoker PLO cash game, where Matt Kirk was down over $3 million after a few sessions - this was mind-blowing content for poker fans, and the multiple hour-long streams still got a considerable amount of views.
Joey Ingram, The Poker Private Investigator
Some of Ingram’s most watched and important streams would come later as he showed his willingness to speak on behalf of poker players about more serious topics. In 2019, Veronica Brill reported some anomalies: Mike Postle's play couldn’t explain his win rate in cash game statistics at the Stones Live stream.
While she was rebutted by management at Stones Gambling Hall, she put forward her findings for Joey Ingram to investigate. He would then spend countless hours going through each Stones Live stream (which went between 4-6 hours long) to review Postle’s hands. He would then create data sheets and look at how Postle acted and performed.
He found that Postle had an essentially impossible win rate and played a style with no clear poker strategy or direction other than to do the right thing to win the pot in play. Joey also found that Postle’s win rate since the stream started hit over $200,000 in just over a year.
Joey Ingram looked into the intricacies of how poker streams and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) worked when it came to streaming poker and also found a light blue screen would occur when a stream showed the poker cards and no camera feed. During one stream, it showed Mike Postle’s phone displaying the same light blue screen, and the phone would often sit awkwardly between his crotch during hands.
Postle would sue Ingram, Brill, and others for $300 million in a suit that lasted a few months, and Ingram would go on to win the Global Poker Awards of Journalist of the Year and Media Content of the Year, primarily due to his investigation into the Stones Live scandal.
In mid-2022, Martin Zamani blew the whistle on Bryn Kenney and his stable. Zamani began accusing the latter of running colluded games on GGPoker, using RTA and ghosting methods through his poker stable in deep tournament spots. He was also caught VPNing from the US to play on GGPoker and even having his poker players use frog poison in a Shaman ritual.
Joey Ingram interviewed Bryn Kenney, Martin Zamani, and others with a perspective on the case. While RTA and ghosting are currently significant issues in the poker community, nothing further would come other than the evidence in Zamani leaked.
Ingram would return to the poker investigation scene in late 2022 when one of the craziest live-streamed poker hands of all time occurred between well-known high stakes crusher Garrett Adelstein and unknown poker recreational Robbie Jade Lew. Garrett would leave the stream and accuse Lew of cheating, which set the wheels in motion for another Chicago Joey investigation.
While the debates roared on, points of view were shared, and even lie detector tests ran, but no one could prove no cheating from the remote location of Joey Ingram. Hustler Casino ran an internal investigation and hired external investigators who came to the same conclusion.
The case was lit alight even further when investigators found that showrunner Bryan Sabsigal stole $25,000 in chips off Robbie Jade Lew’s chip stack, which was the exclusive misdeed during that poker stream.
Joey Ingram’s Life Away From Poker
Joey Ingram’s poker content creation seems to be entirely on the back burner, as he took a break after the Mike Postle scandal and only came back when the Chicago Joey bat sign was lit up in the poker night sky.
Joey has spent time between his residence in Las Vegas, the long hiatus in Mexico, and investing in other ventures besides poker content. He is one of a few investors in a poker app called Cash Live and also is involved in cryptocurrency projects.
His passion and love for poker seem to be waning after the increase in scandals, Ingram told Poker.org this year:
“I’ve had enough of this shit. I’ve had enough of these fucking people.
“... you have to watch yourself around these people when money gets involved because people are trying to do whatever it takes to separate you from your money.”
The poker community rallied around Ingram, letting him know how important he is to ensure these scandals get investigated and looked into as big operators slide them under the carpet.
Wherever Joey Ingram is now, and whatever he decides to pursue in the future, he has left an indelible mark in the game of poker. We hope to see him commentating on some wild PLO games again someday!
