Dan Harrington

“I’m there for the money. You can keep the glory.”

Dan Harrington is one of the most successful poker players of all time. He is popularly known by the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Action Dan”.

He plays strategically sound poker and specializes in a tight aggressive style of play.

His tournament poker winnings are ranked amongst the most impressive in the world. He has won almost $7 million in poker tournaments.

His big wins include the World Series of Poker Championship Event in 1995 and a World Poker Tour Championship Event title.

Despite having some of the best tournament results in the world, he is not a professional poker player.

He spends most of his time running his extremely successful investment company – Anchor Loans – located in Santa Monica, California with a stunning view of the ocean.

Anchor Loans invests in both real estate and the stock market, which, according to him “are just other types of games”.

At heart, he is a games specialist. Besides playing poker, real estate and the stock market, he is a former backgammon champion and chess master.

Dan Harrington’s poker books have made a significant contribution to poker theory and tournament strategy including his best selling series Harrington on Hold’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments.

Incredible World Series of Poker Success

Dan Harrington won the WSOP Championship Event in 1995 and $1,000,000 in prize money. Just days before winning the Main Event, he also won a bracelet in the $2,500 No Limit Hold’em Event making 1995 a very memorable and successful year for him.

In addition to winning the Championship Event in 1995, he has made the Main Event Final Table on three other occasions.

In 1987, the year that Johnny Chan won his back-to-back WSOP title, he made the final table and finished in 6^th place.  He was a relatively unknown player at the time.

In the modern era, he would go on to accomplish one of the most amazing feats in poker history, making back-to-back final tables in 2003 and 2004 when the fields were extremely large in size. He would finish 3^rd in 2003 WSOP Main Event, the year that Chris Moneymaker took the title in a field of 839 entrants.

Again in the 2004 WSOP Main Event, Action Dan would feature at the final table. Battling through a massive 2,576 players, he would finish in 4^th place and win $1,500,000.

These back-to-back finishes were dubbed “the greatest accomplishment in WSOP history”.

World Poker Tour Victory

Dan Harrington would win the World Poker Tour No Limit Hold’em Championship Event in 2007 and add another $1,635,000 to his tournament tally.

By winning a WPT title, he would join the select few who have won both the WSOP Main Event and a WPT title including Doyle Brunson, Scotty Nguyen, Carlos Mortensen and Joe Hachem.

He also finished as the runner-up at the World Poker Tour’s 2^nd Annual Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship in 2005 netting $620,000 in the process.

Harrington on Hold’em – Expert Strategy For No-Limit Tournaments

Harrington, along with co-author Bill Robertie, wrote the popular Harrington on Hold’em series. The three volume series provides one of the best written works on No Limit Hold’em poker strategy available. The series is considered a must read for any serious tournament player.

Harrington on Hold’em – Volume 1: Strategic Play takes the reader through the early and middle stages of a tournament. This volume covers important topics including hand selection, table analysis, betting patterns and instruction from pre-flop to river play.

Harrington on Hold’em – Volume 2: The Endgame covers play in the later stages of the tournament and discusses the strategies necessary to win the tournament as the blinds become a huge factor. Harrington introduces the concept of “M” and the Poker Zone Theory that uses “M” to help the player quickly gauge the optimum strategy given the ratio of blinds and antes to their chip stack.

Harrington and Robertie would team up again to write the two volume series – Harrington on Cash Games: How to Win at No-Limit Hold’em Money Games. This series focuses on the very popular No Limit Hold’em cash game format. These books feature great hand examples and analysis which made the original tournament series a huge success.

Keeping up-to-date with the modern internet game, Harrington wrote an important online cash game book that teaches readers how to beat today’s online game and use the poker software tools available to up their win rate.  This important book is Harrington on Online Cash Games: 6 Max No Limit Hold’em.

The Best in the Business

Dan Harrington has proven himself time and time again to be one of the greatest poker players and theorists of all time. With today’s modern game becoming super loose and aggressive, many speculated that Action Dan’s approach to the game would become outdated.

He has gone on to prove that nothing could be further from the truth. His solid, conservative play continues to reap multi-million dollar rewards for him and he has in fact won the majority of his money in the last decade.