Doyle Brunson was born in 1933. While in college he began to play professional basketball. However a leg injury put an end to his basketball career. Brunson began to use the winnings from his poker games to fund his education. He thus obtained a master’s degree in administrative education and took a job as a business machines salesman. He soon realized that he could make three months salary in three hours playing poker professionally.

In those days poker was played as illegal games. Brunson, Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts formed a threesome called the Texas Rounders. They traveled around Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana gambling on whatever games they could find. Ultimately they landed in Las Vegas where they split as partners but continued to play individually. It was Brunson who brought respectability to the game that was believed to be the domain of roughnecks. He began playing for high stakes in hotels where tourists would come watch him play.

The live poker tournament that Brunson is most associated with is the WSOP. From 1976 to 2005 Brunson won 10 WSOP bracelets. While doing so he has established several firsts. Brunson was the first to win two consecutive WSOP Main Events, which he did in 1976 and 1977. He is also one of only four players to have won the WSOP Main Event multiple times. He was the first player to earn $1 million in poker tournaments. He won the Legends of Poker WPT event in 2004 Brunson and became the first player to win both the WSOP Main Event and a WPT title. Brunson’s total live poker tournament earnings are at about $5.1 million. He has had 43 cashes and 12 first place finishes.

Brunson today prefers to play high stakes cash games to live poker tournaments. He is seen playing $4000/$8000 limit mixed poker game in “Bobby’s Room” at the Bellagio Casino almost daily. He often hosts high-stakes Texas Hold’em poker games that cost $100,000 just to sit down.

Brunson runs his own online poker room called Doyle’s Room, where he plays regularly. The highlight of the online poker room is the weekly bounty tournament in which he, some poker professionals and some celebrities play with a bounty on their heads. Another feature of his online poker room is his blogs on the goings on in the poker community.

Brunson’s nickname is Texas Dolly, which first arose as a mispronunciation of Doyle but stuck. He has two Texas Hold’em hands named after him. Brunson is the author of one of the best poker books Super/System, which was first published in 1978. An updated version, Super/System 2 was released in 2004.

Brunson was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame way back in 1988. The power he still commands in the poker community can be gauged from the fact that Bluff magazine voted him the most influential force in the world of poker in 2006.

Brunson lives with his wife in Las Vegas. His son, daughter, daughter-in-law and nephew also live in Las Vegas and play poker.