Ryan Reiss And His Meteoric Rise To Become 2013 WSOP Champion

The world’s newest WSOP Main Event champion Ryan Riess, 23, was the youngest player at the final table and just one in a long line of players in their early 20’s who have regularly been winning the prestigious tournament since Peter Eastgate in 2008.
Apparently, Reiss, like many poker players, had a head for numbers and first became fascinated with poker in 2003 after watching  Chris Moneymaker win the main event for $2.5 million. As the young Michigan man explains:
“I started playing poker when I was 14 years old. I actually taught myself. One of my friends learned how to play before me. He was playing and I was like, “Oh I want to play.” I basically just taught myself how to play and was always really good at it. I took it very seriously.”
Soon after, Ryan Reiss started beating his friends at low-stake games in his parent’s basement and vowed one day to win the World Series of Poker main event. Following graduation from Michigan State University, Reiss said he then decided to enter a tournament in Hammond [Indiana], and his professional career was born after finishing runner-up at the WSOPC $1,675 Main Event for $239,063. That was at the end of 2012, and one short year later and Ryan Reiss is already top of the poker world.
Going into Monday’s final table, Reiss certainly was brimming with confidence and having completed his remarkable victory on Tuesday night for a cool $8,359,531, the poker pro’s confidence reached new heights, declaring “I just think I’m the best player in the world.”
Modesty aside, the game does require an abundance of belief to succeed and Ryan Reiss has it in bundles. As his girlfriend Tabitha Trask, explains: “He had so much confidence in himself that I really thought he was going to win. And he was not nervous today; he was so composed.”
Following the nine-day WSOP marathon in which he bested a field of  6,352 players, including Jay Farber heads-up, Riess’s fledgling poker career couldn’t have achieved more meteoric success and his face has already been immortalized in the WSOP record books, alongside such poker legends as Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth and Johnny Chan.