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  Like many high end poker players - Curt Kohlberg of Weston, Massachusetts started playing poker with friends just for fun. He still insists that he has no desire to be considered a true professional poker player. Kohlberg was introduced to the sport as a young, ambitious college student at the University of Massachusetts where he was a five-card draw and seven-card stud ace. Along with poker he played paddleball, racquetball, wrote a sports column for his college newspaper, and was an entrepreneur selling shirts at rock concerts.

  Kianoush Abolfathi may not be a household name (and perhaps not the one easily pronounced) in the world of poker, but there are a lot of game announcers who are practicing the pronunciation of his name these days. And for good reason.

  In poker, other than filling out the registration form, paying your entry fee and proving who you are before you sit in at a professional poker tournament, a lot of players (at least this is the impression we often get watching poker events on TV) happily hide behind sunglasses and under baseball caps – not really the best way to make yourself unique and stand out for yourself. Some players will tell you that's just part of the game, and that you need to be prepared for "faceless" opponents when you take a seat at the table these days.

  Call him underdog if you want, but Americans have a love affair with the underdog, no matter the sport. It's one of those endearing qualities that the rest of the world loves about them (we are half-joking here). However, what qualifies as an "underdog" in the world of poker?

  It wasn't quite an absence measured in dog years, but it was close. Jack Zwerner's 6 year hiatus between his last cash in and then his first place success in 2006 must have felt like he was buried with the bone. But all it took was that first place – in no less than Event 8 of the 2006 World Series of Poker – to feel alive again at the poker table.

  Paul Phillips may look like Gus Hansen, but then again he looks like a California "Surfer Dude" sometimes, too. His online poker blog has a pic of Paul with long dreadlocks, but when he appeared on the World Poker Tour opposite Hansen, his head was shaved, and his very expensive suit belied any thoughts of surfers. Paul was, and is, a millionaire, and he looked the part. He is a straight shooter, as he describes himself, and one who is very, very comfortable on the Internet. In fact, Phillips was one of those who made millions off the dot-com boom of the nineties.

  Michael Guttman is from Melbourne, Australia, and, like fellow countryman Joe Hachem, he is doing his country proud at the poker tables. Although Guttman has not won a main event at the World Series of Poker as Hachem has, there is no denying that Michael is an Aussie poker player to keep an eye on.

  Alex Kahaner is a business owner from Van Nuys, California. Any business owner has to be a risk taker, to one degree or another, and Alex decided to take that risk taking element of his personality to the extreme to compete in the World Poker Tour. Alex had never played in a major poker tournament before, but then before he started his construction company, he had never started a construction company before, either. Any entrepreneur will tell you, you have to do something a first time to discover if you are going to be any good at it.

  Ben Roberts was born in Iran but moved to London, England as a teenager. While the beaches in England are not known for super fun sun spots, they certainly were a staging area for a change in Ben' life - when a buddy produced a deck of cards and began teaching Ben how to play poker, the young Roberts was hooked "from the first deal."