Lucky for Greg Raymer, he’s a betting man. The biggest gamble of his career came four years ago when he awoke one morning in a Las Vegas hotel room with $2 million in poker chips. After six days of playing no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, the amateur had gained the lead among 2,576 players who’d put down $10,000 each to enter the 2004 World Series of Poker. There were only 32 contenders left, each vying for a spot at the final table and a first-place prize of $5 million cash.

Raymer’s dilemma was this: He was due in Tucson, Arizona the next day for a second interview for a job as the in-house patent attorney at a small firm seeking to grow its biotech business. The position was enticing. Besides the opportunity for a higher salary, the change very likely would give Raymer more independence than he’d had at Pfizer, where he was part of a legal team of more than 100 patent attorneys. Raymer reckoned that he had only a 10 percent chance of winning the tournament based on the chips he had.

Despite the odds, Raymer had already made up his mind. The family man picked up the phone, postponed his job interview, and headed across the street for a protein-charged breakfast of Teriyaki beef. Then he headed back to the casino. Two days later, he became the 11th amateur to win first place in the main event of what is widely considered the world’s most prestigious poker tournament.

“When people used to ask me about being a patent attorney, I’d say, ‘It’s a good job if you have to work for a living,’” says the 44-year-old Raymer. “But until I became a full-time poker pro, I’m not really sure I found my calling.”

Raymer first got a taste of the game at the University of Missouri, where he played for nickels and dimes with his fraternity brothers while earning a BS in chemistry. It was not until 1992, when he’d graduated with a law degree from the University of Minnesota and began working as a patent litigator with a Chicago firm, that he played regularly. At the same time, he started boning up on the game with books such as The Theory of Poker by David Slansky, considered one of the foremost experts on poker theory.

But Raymer says he actually learned some of the most basic skills he uses in poker as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, where he had to clone and sequence a gene from soil bacteria to earn his MS in biochemistry. “You have to look at a situation, consider all the appropriate factors, and reach a logical conclusion,” he says. In both poker and science, he explains, conclusions are only as strong as the quality of the data that’s been gathered. In poker, the easy data to collect are facts: How much, for instance, is each player betting?