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?

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.”

But Raymer isn’t griping. In addition to paying him a monthly fee as their representative, PokerStars covers all of Raymer’s travel expenses and buy-in fees for the tournaments he enters; Raymer keeps whatever he wins. Top prizes range from a few hundred dollars to several million, depending on the size of the competition. Last year, Raymer competed in nearly 40 live events, in addition to another 40 or so online. In one online tournament alone, he pocketed $168,000 for first place. Since 2000, his tournament winnings, excluding online ones, have totaled more than $6 million, according to thehendonmob.com, Europe’s biggest poker portal. His reputation has opened the door to other ventures, including a contract to write a book on tournament poker strategy and work as a poker instructor, as well as gigs as a tournament host and TV commentator. He also speaks at private events that net him as much as $30,000 per appearance. 

Raymer says he hasn’t really splurged, except for buying a hybrid Lexus SUV for himself and a BMW for his wife. He still owns the house he bought in Stonington, Connecticut, while working for Pfizer, but has since moved his family to a new home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I do plan on installing an indoor driving range, but only if I win another prize of half a million or more,” he says.

Although Raymer is now in a tiny club of elite poker players—he currently ranks 20th on a list of 1,000 players who have the highest combined winnings from all the major tournaments played since 2000, according to thehendonmob.com—other celebrity players who tour with Raymer say he is a low-key guy. “We travel around the world, and we entertain thousands of players, and he’s probably the best at holding a crowd out of all of us,” says Chris Moneymaker, who won the World Series of Poker in 2003. Moneymaker says Raymer is highly methodical, approaching the game more like a scientist than the stereotypical poker player. “He’s not particularly superstitious,” says Moneymaker. “A lot of players are. He knows the game is purely about skill and math.”

As for Raymer, he does confess to one superstition—drawing an 8 of spades and an 8 of diamonds, which were his winning hand at the 2004 tournament. “It’s been four years since, and I’ve lost with those two cards only once,” he reveals. “There might be a situation where, if you had that hand, you would fold, but I won’t do it.” It’s a hand that may give him comfort. Too bad he can’t patent that.