You might never guess it from seeing Grundy at the tables, however.
The unassuming Brit doesn’t bring any of the flash that fellow high-stakes pros like Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies and Viktor “Isildur1” Blom are known to display.
He isn’t even involved in a major scandal like most poker players these days. About the most Grundy has been accused of is publishing a fake graph of his results.
Most Impressive Graph in Poker
The graph, categorically referred to as one of the most impressive ones in poker, showed his lifetime earnings in PLO rising from $0 to $7.8 million in a four-year span.
It works out to $5,397 a day in profit.
“A lot of people do think it’s fake,” said Grundy on a break in the $10k PLO tournament at the WSOP. “People will type in the chatbox on PokerStars that it’s fake.
"No one has ever taken me up on my bet to disprove it though.”
Grundy offered $60,000 to anyone if he can’t prove beyond a doubt it was his graph. So far no one has taken him up on the bet.
The Chiswick, London, resident initially became interested in poker when his father’s friend Mansour Matloubi won the WSOP Main Event in 1990.
Grundy began playing PLO with his friends and began his online career in the early 2000s.
Since then it’s been an up-and-down run for Grundy, although mostly up. This year Grundy had a goal of reaching $1 million in combined profit on his various online poker accounts.
“After three months I was up like $1.3 million online, then I dropped like $600k on PokerStars in April and I’ve barely played since then,” he said. “You tend to take some time off when you lose that much.”
Grundy admitted it becomes difficult to find high-stakes online games during the WSOP when everyone is actually playing live poker.
“It’s tough to get action at those kinds of stakes in general.”
Grundy Still a Pot-Limit Omaha Master
Grundy has emerged as one of the premier online high-stakes pros since Black Friday locked out the majority of U.S. players last April.
“I don’t think they’ve changed too much,” he said. "You’ve lost some players but a lot of the good players have moved out of the USA to play. That’s made the games a little bit tougher."
A PLO-specialist, Grundy avoids playing popular No-Limit Hold’em. Grundy was ahead of the curve in that respect as many skilled players migrated to the game over the last few years in search of softer tables.
“The general standard of play has definitely got higher across the board in PLO over the last two or three years,” Grundy said.
These days Grundy only plays five or six live tournaments a year and prefers to concentrate on the profitable high-stakes PLO games that are available online.
Grundy is heavily involved with staking site SharkStaking.com where he is the lead trainer and an ambassador for the site.
He also writes a popular blog where he talks about his life and online poker. He recently recounted the experience of building his own home over 12 months.
“I ended up going way over budget and then I lost a huge amount of money online in the middle of the project and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish it,” he said.
Grundy did finish the house, however, and mentioned it was a major accomplishment in his life.
“I love it,” he said. "It’s an amazing house."
Grundy doesn’t plan on spending much time on the live tournament circuit after the WSOP and instead will focus on online poker.
“The rest of the year I’m just going to try and get rolling on PokerStars again,” he said. “Try and get my money back.”
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