Andy Bloch started playing poker in the early 1990s, after graduating from MIT with two electrical engineering degrees. His poker career has been very successful, especially after becoming a full time professional. Andy Bloch grew up “with a deck of cards in his crib”, but he did not take poker seriously until he graduated from MIT.
During his MIT years he was a member of the MIT Blackjack Club “The Amphibians,” where he has said he made as much as $100,000 in one blackjack session. As his skills grew, he increasingly used poker and blackjack to earn money between jobs and even to finance his Harvard Law Studies.
In 1993, Andy Bloch lost his job. While he was unemployed, the Foxwoods introduced a new game, Hickok Six-Card Poker. It was similar to Caribbean Stud and instead of a table of other players, the gambler was up against the house. Around this time Bloch joined a poker group in Boston. He discovered them on Usenet and the group proved invaluable to players who were mathematically inclined in poker. Also around that time, Andy Bloch acquired a new job designing network computer chips. While at his new job, he developed some computer programs that helped to create strategies to beat the game Hickok. Poker started to take priority over his law studies, and he missed part of the last week of classes in 1997 and 1998 to play the World Series Of Poker (WSOP). After passing the bar he decided to delay his legal career to go into poker full-time, and he remains to this day a dedicated and successful poker player.
In 2001, he made it to two final tables of the WSOP. In January 2002 at the Jack Binion World Poker Open, No Limit Hold’Em event, he took eighth place and won $27,160. Then in November 2002 at the World Poker Tour Season One, Andy Bloch took first place at the Limit Seven-Card Stud event and earned $42,920. Then at the No Limit Hold’Em event, he took third place and earned $102,350. At the L.A. Poker Classic in February of 2003, Andy Bloch won another third place in No Limit Hold’Em and earned $125,460. Despite his success, Andy Bloch can no longer play in the World Poker Tour events. He refuses to sign the WPT agreement that he feels is unfair to the players and could place them in financial stress with other sponsors.
Andy Bloch has won over $2,800,000 playing poker tournaments. In 2006, he finished 2nd for over $1,000,000 in the first $50,000 buy-in H.O.R.S.E tournament at the World Series of Poker, after the longest recorded heads up battle in WSOP history, where he had Chip Reese all-in 4 different times. Later in 2006, Andy Bloch won the Pro Am Poker Equalizer, which airs in early 2007.
Andy has had multiple WSOP final table appearances, 2 WPT final tables and 8 WPT money finishes, plus another Ultimate Poker Challenge win and three other UPC final tables. Other wins include the 2002 Seven-Card Stud event at the World Poker Finals, and the 2004 $1,000 No-Limit Hold ‘em Hot Tex tournament at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas.
Lawyer, engineer, best poker player and even occasional poet – there is a section of original poetry in his website – Andy Bloch has probably still got a few more aces up his sleeve, and although he is rumored to be on the lookout for a law-related job, it does not seem very likely that he will make that career change soon.
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