The tougher challenge is correctly analyzing opponents’ behavior for clues to determine the strength of their cards. Key to improving your game, Raymer says, is learning to determine whether a victory results from a smart decision or plain luck. “If you are going to be a good poker player, you have to ignore short-term results,” he says. “Scientists know that. You do an experiment once and you get a result, but that might mean nothing until you reproduce an experiment a sufficient number of times and keep getting the same result.”

After his big win in 2004, Raymer cancelled the job interview he had been worrying about and accepted an offer to tour and play as a representative for PokerStars, the poker website where he won the online tournament that originally earned him a seat at the 2004 World Series of Poker.

These days, fans usually recognize him by his John Lennon-style, round sunglasses with hologram lenses designed to look like lizard eyes. He bought the shades in 2002 at Disney World with his daughter, Sophie, who was 5 at the time, just before entering his first World Series of Poker event. He put them on during the game as a joke, but found they were highly effective at distracting his opponents, so the look has stuck.

His nickname “The Fossilman” comes from his habit of using an orthoceras fossil as a card protector at tournaments. The practice arose, in part, from a deal he made with his wife Cheryl before he went pro to bankroll his playing with $1,000. He vowed to quit playing if he ever lost the sum. Soon after making that promise, he and his wife attended a rock and mineral show, where he bought the fossil. On the poker circuit, it quickly caught the eye of other players, which gave him the idea for a side business: selling fossils at tournaments to other players. The move would supplement his bankroll so that he could get into higher-stakes games. “I was confident I was never going to go broke,” says Raymer, “but I had to keep my word.”

Raymer isn’t the only one with ties to the biotech world to gain fame in a game that has seen its popularity boom in recent years. (One measure of the game’s popularity comes from the Internet, where poker generated an estimated 27.6 percent of the total revenues from online gaming last year, up from just 2.3 percent in 2002, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors, a New York City-based firm that tracks the gambling industry.) One of poker’s legends is Crandall Addington, an entrepreneur whose businesses include Phoenix Biotechnology, an alternative cancer research center in San Antonio. Addington, a member of the Poker Hall of Fame, was among the Texans who converged in Reno, Nevada, in 1969 to play a series of high-stakes poker games that gave Benny Binion, owner of Binion’s Horseshoe Las Vegas, the idea to launch the World Series of Poker the following year. Unlike Addington, however, who played poker while pursuing business ventures, Raymer’s business is poker.

Even though this new business is plenty glam—Raymer flies regularly to London, Paris, and Monte Carlo and occasionally to cities such as Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney—it, like any other, has its downsides. For Raymer, the major drawback is the time it takes away from his wife and daughter. He spends more than eight months of the year on the road. And even when he is home, his time is often compromised. “If I am out with my family, we are going to have fans who approach me and want an autograph,” he says. “People are really friendly, but still, it’s something that takes away from your personal time.”