Greg "Fossilman" Raymer

I am a 40 year old husband and father. My wife Cheryl and I have been married 10 years now, and our daughter Sophie is 8. I was born in 1964 in Minot, North Dakota, an Air Force brat. However, when I was just a few months old, my father ended his military service, and took us back to Michigan where he was from. I grew up in Lansing until the age of 11, when we moved to the Clearwater, Florida area. After a few years, we moved to Manchester, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis, where I spent my high school years at Parkway South H.S.

I have a B.S. in Chemistry from the U. of Missouri at Rolla, an M.S. in Biochemistry from the U. of Minnesota, and a J.D. also from the U. of Minnesota. I was 28 years old in 1992 before I finished school and started my first permanent job. I was a patent attorney working for a big I.P. litigation law firm in Chicago for 3 years before deciding that I did not like litigation. I ended up working for another law firm in San Diego for 3 years where I specialized in Biotechnology patent preparation and prosecution. I then decided to get out of the law firm lifestyle, where you have to work 60-80 hours per week, and go to a corporate job. I ended up accepting a position with Pfizer, Inc., the world's largest pharmaceutical company, at their research facility in Groton, CT. I moved to Stonington, CT, the next town over, in late 1998, and stayed with the company until just after winning the WSOP in 2004.

While in school in Minnesota, I made extra money by playing blackjack as a card counter at the various Indian casinos in the state. When I got my first job in Chicago, there were no readily beatable blackjack games available. While looking for a blackjack game, I found a poker game, and played for fun. I had already learned the basics of the game while in college playing in nickel-dime-quarter games in my fraternity and with my friends in grad school and law school. However, in those little game we were all pretty pathetic, and none of us knew how to play very well. Once I started playing 3-6 limit poker in Chicago, I decided I should learn how to play well, and bought myself some poker books to study. Fortunately, one of the first books I found was The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky, which helped a lot to lay the groundwork for all my future poker education. While in Chicago, I mostly played 3-6. In San Diego, I moved up from 3-6 to 10-20 and occasionally 20-40. I also started to learn big bet poker in the 3,5 blind pot-limit holdem games in Oceanside, and also learned tournament poker at this time. In CT, I moved up from 10-20 to 20-40 to 150-300, and gained a reputation as one of the best local tournament players at Foxwoods.

Now, I am an itinerant poker professional. I work for PokerStars.com, as their paid representative. I travel the world playing in many of the major poker tournaments. Winning the WSOP has also allowed me to be hired to endorse a variety of poker-related products, as well as to make paid appearances at casinos and other venues. I am currently writing a book to be published by 2+2 Publishing, and, as always, I am actively trying to win more major poker titles.

In addition to poker, I also enjoy spending time with my family, playing golf, and going to estate auctions to buy antiques for our home. As an undergraduate and in graduate school, I worked part-time as a radio DJ and party DJ. I also did stand-up comedy while going to graduate and law school in Minnesota. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I have no problem with talking in front of a crowd or into a microphone. I was always very easy-going with an audience, very relaxed. Unfortunately, I just wasn't all that funny. ;-)

As for the nickname, in about 1995 I made a deal with my wife that I would have a bankroll for poker, separate from my income, savings, and investments. This bankroll was $1000. If I played and won, I could do whatever I wanted with the money, e.g., move up in limits, buy stuff, whatever. However, if I lost all of the money, I had promised to quit playing poker forever. In about 1996, my wife took me to a rock and mineral show in San Diego, where we lived at that time. I bought an orthoceras fossil because I thought it was neat and would make a great card protector. Many of the other players at the Oceanside Card Club also thought it was neat. I then had the idea to go back to the show, buy more fossils, and sell them at a profit. And it worked quite well. So, I went into the business of selling fossils whenever I played poker, as a way of more quickly building my bankroll so I could get into bigger games.

As for the glasses, I bought my lizard-eye 3-D hologram sunglasses at the gift shop connected to the Tower of Terror ride at Disney MGM Studios in Disneyworld, Orlando, FL. I was there on a family vacation prior to my first WSOP main event in 2002. I thought it would be a funny joke to put them on in the middle of an important hand. However, when I first did so, instead of making everybody laugh, the glasses freaked out my opponent in the hand, and caused him to fold. Since then, I've found that some of my opponents are very uncomfortable playing against me because of the glasses, and therefore I've continued to wear them during major tournaments.

I am still looking for a company to manufacture "official" FossilMan sunglasses. The ones I wore are thin wire-frame glasses, and there is no space on them for adding the FossilMan brand. I am going to find a company who can make them with a thicker plastic frame, and add the FossilMan logo to them.

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