Allen Cunningham is the winner of several WSOP bracelets. He took the fourth place in the Main Event in 2006 when Jamie Gold won.Unofficial site about Allen Cunningham
- Allen Cunningham was born in Riverside California on the 28th of March, 1977.
- Cunningham is not married but has a girlfriend, Melissa Hayden.
- And one ‘child’ – a dog named Muffin.
- Cunningham became a member of Full Tilt Poker in October 2006 after being a sponsored pro.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Allen Cunningham is a lot like Richie Cunningham of Happy Days fame. His demeanour is sweet and boyish but it conceals perhaps the most analytical player in poker today.
Born to Dean and Joanne Cunningham he played poker with his family and it was during these family matches that he began to develop a love of the game. He kept poker as a hobby during college, when he studied engineering at UCLA. Cunningham spent some evenings and weekends at the casino, slowly but surely increasing his bankroll and paying for his meagre student needs.
This changed in his second year of school however when he seemed to change up a gear. Cunningham entered several tournaments and higher stakes cash games than he had been playing, clocking up a few successes and sealing his fate as a poker devotee.
At only 19, he left school and embarked on a career as a professional poker player. The only problem (a big one) is that it would be two more years before he was able to legally play. Although the legal gambling age is 18 in most parts of the world, it remains 21 in the United States and Cunningham was forced to play at underground tournaments. He credits this experience with toughening him up. The underground poker world is, as you would expect, less regulated than the true professional circuit and Cunningham quickly developed a strong radar not only for signals that he would be playing a hard game but also for more immediate dangers. He learned the hard way in the early days, being cheated more than once and by the time the magic age of 21 rolled around he had cut his teeth enough to be able to jump straight into the mid-level stakes tournaments.
Success didn’t come immediately though and Cunningham found he needed to refine his game to a sophisticated level that he hadn’t experienced at the rougher tables of the underground. His timing was impeccable though, as he had entered the tournament circuit at a time when poker was beginning to sweep the world, snowballing into the phenomenonally large industry that it has become. He was at the new frontier with some of the most successful players in poker today, although he didn’t know it at the time (and neither did they). These names include Daniel Negreanu and John Juanda and they remain a tight knit group today.
In his second year of playing professionally (and legally) he had his first big break, finishing in the top ten twice at the 1999 legends of Poker in Los Angeles. IN the same tournament he had two wins, netting him a tidy bankroll and being voted ‘Best All-Round Player.’ A few months later he won the Seven Card Stud Event at the US Poker Championships and a respectable second place in the No Limit Hold ‘Em ($1,000).
The year 2000 was another leap into greatness. Cunningham’s careful analytical style (it’s the engineer in him) took him into the top twenty in five tournaments. One of these was a second in the $5,000 Omaha Hi Lo which increased his bankroll by more than a hundred thousand dollars. Not bad work for a guy who was still regularly being asked for ID at the bar. In 2001 he won his first World Series of Poker bracelet, beating out a field of 104 players to take a solid two hundred thousand dollars in the $5,000 Seven Card Stud event fin Las Vegas.
2006 was Cunningham’s golden year. The year before he had won more than a million dollars in the lead-up to the World Series of Poker Main Event (the only player to have ever become a millionaire before the final even began) and he thought he was in for a steady but unremarkable year. It was not to be. He entered the 2006 $1,000 No Limit Hold ‘Em and proved his stamina, holding out against a whopping 1,670 re-buys to win his fourth World Series of Poker bracelet. But the tournament wasn’t over yet. He placed sixth in the $5,000 No Limit Deuce-to-Seven and against 9,000 entrants placed fourth in the Main Event, walking away with $3.6 million dollars.
Allen Cunningham and Mike "The Mouth" Matusow in a Full Tilt commercial
To Cunningham, this was a crushing blow. He had entered the game with $17.7 million dollars in chips, outweighed only by Jamie Gold’s $26.6 million. Although to mere mortals, a fourth place and three and a half million dollars seems like a damn good day’s work, Cunningham hasn’t gained his success by being content with fourth place. When he walked out of Rio Casino, he spoke to no-one and his head hung low. It was a sign of a badly bruised Cunningham, his usually unemotional style failing him for once.
From failure comes the ingredients for success however, and when Allen Cunningham had licked his wounds he analysed his own game and put in place strategies for prevention of future similar errors. Although he has yet to hit another pot like the three and a half million he walked away with in 2006, his placings have steadily climbed. Allen Cunningham has always been more motivated by the win than by the money (a sentiment echoed by almost all professional poker players, one of the few exceptions being Doyle Brunson who spent his early years playing poker purely to support his family).
Allen Cunningham diversified his interests by teaming up with the Full Tilt poker team along with other players like Clonie Gowen, Erick Lindgren, Jennifer Harman and John Juanda. By playing online exclusively with Full Tilt he not only ensures himself passive revenue and publicity that has often been missing for the gentle-natured Cunningham, but also allows him to keep his game sharp. He says playing online is similar to blindfolding yourself during training. Because he can’t see the people he is playing against, he appreciates the opportunity to read his competitors purely through their play, without visual cues like gender, ethnicity or body language to help or hinder his interpretation. He credits online poker with sharpening his game.
Which is exactly what makes this Mr Nice Guy so dangerous: He never becomes complacent.
- The first time he played poker for money was at summer camp.
- He plays poker online only at Full Tilt Poker.
- He was voted ‘The best all-round player under 35’ by his fellow poker players.