Unofficial site about Andy Bloch

• Andy Bloch was born in Orange, Connecticut on June 1st 1969.
• He isn’t married but is in a relationship.
• Andy Bloch is 6 feet tall, an atheist and a Gemini.
• Bloch graduated from MIT and Harvard Law School.
• Andy Bloch plays online exclusively at Full Tilt Poker.

Andy Bloch says that he “practically grew up with a deck of cards.” Throughout his childhood and teenage years he could often be found playing against friends and family. An intelligent child, he graduated high school and enrolled in the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking up a place in the equally prestigious Harvard law course. While he was at NIT he interned at IBM and was part of a team that developed a widely successful chip that helped put IBM on the map.

Also during his years at MIT he was a successful member of the college’s blackjack team, a skill that would earn him a name as part of the renowned group of MIT students (the MIT Blackjack Team) who perfected the art of counting cards. The original card counting methods were developed by Ed Thorpe, who used early computers to devise the system. The MIT Blackjack Team simplified his ideas and developed an easy way to count cards at the table. Although this is not illegal, Andy Bloch has been banned from more than 350 casinos around the world and tells tales of ‘back-rooming’, harassment and threats from casino owners and staff before a series of lawsuits forced casinos to use more gentle methods of dissuading patrons from card-counting. He has been arrested on numerous occasions for card-counting but the charges have always been dropped when it becomes apparent that card-counting is a legal blackjack skill. In all cases, he has used his law degree to defend himself.

Andy Bloch plays at Full Tilt Poker. They offer a 100% up to $600 Full Tilt Poker referral code.

It was between MIT and Harvard that he became more interested in poker. After graduating with not one but two engineering degrees he became a regular at the Foxwoods casino in his spare time. It was in 1992 that he entered his first tournament, the World Poker Finals at Foxwood. The tournament was played over most of that year and he won his first title in a game that was new to him, No Limit Hold'Em.

The following year he was fired from his job as an engineer in Westchester County and played poker to support himself while he looked for a new job. Although he found one, by the mid 1990s he had grown tired of the industry and turned more and more to the tables for both excitement and income. He had joked to his parents in earlier years that if engineering didn’t work out he could always play poker full-time but now the joke had become a reality.

Bloch needed another challenge. Not satisfied with golf or stamp collecting as others might be, he applied to Harvard Law and was accepted. Interestingly he was rejected by both Yale and Stanford but began studying in 1996 and graduated in 1999, passing the bar exam soon after. All during his studies he had continued to play poker and blackjack to pay for his tuition. In 1997 and 1998 he even missed some of his final weeks of school to play in the World Series of Poker.

Although he passed the bar, he has never been employed as a lawyer and the only cases he has argued have been those in which he defended himself. He tells friends that he is “still looking” for an interesting legal job.

As Texas Hold ‘Em exploded in world-wide popularity, Andy Bloch cashed in on the craze by teaming up with Howard Lederer, Phil Gordon, Phil Ivey and Chris Ferguson to establish Full Tilt Poker, where he still plays around 10 hours a week in his own room.

Bloch prefers tournament play to cash tables as he says that tournament play allows for a reckless style of poker playing. Because a player only has their buy-in to lose, whereas cash tables carry high loss risks, Bloch loves the looser style of play. His tournament record is impressive, with a second place in the World Series of Poker H.O.R.S.E. event gaining him over a million dollars in prize money in a single event.

Andy Bloch about his poker history

In 2005 he publicly declared that wouldn’t be playing any World Poker Tournament games after disputes involving the WPT use of player’s images, interviews, ‘behind the scenes’ footage and other representation in the media. He urged the WPT board to adjust the wording of the release that player’s are forced to sign and “refused to be held to ransom” until they did. Ironically, a website that he developed himself and still maintains (WPTfan.com) was originally dedicated to discussion of the World Poker Tournament, but now is a general poker forum that Bloch regularly contributes to.

Unlike Erik Seidel, Bloch loves sharing his tips and insights into poker. As well as his own site, his MySpace site, Full Tilt and wpt.com, he has released an instructional course on how to count cards in blackjack. The simple system of allocating a positive or negative number to a card depending on its category has become wildly successful, a lucrative move by Andy Bloch that allows him to donate all of his proceeds from Full Tilt to charity.

• Bloch donates all of his winnings on Full Tilt Poker to charity.
• He is a Rock, Paper, Scissors champion winning the 2003 Roshambo World Championship. Roshambo is another name for RSP.
• At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he was a member of the Baker House Ultimate Frisbee Club.
• Bloch was once a crew member on a yacht that sailed from New York to St Petersburg in Russia.