The gaming world is one with many a professional poker player that have yet to be reckoned with, including one man, Barry Greenstein. Poker has seen many forces and players of different skill and levels of commitment and Greenstein has proven to be one to be on the look out for. Barry was born on the day of Dec. 30, 1945 in the great city that is known as Chicago, Illinois.
From a very young age, playing cards with people around him was one of his favorite things to do. This would only serve as the initial stepping stone of his future career in professional poker playing in the many years that were to come soon after. From the start, many people noticed that Greenstein definitely had a gift for poker playing and his parents helped to guide him on developing a skill at the game that he has since became famous for. From his early teen years, he would play poker games at home and win anything up to fifty dollars per night, which is impressive considering the age that he started to clean the tables. Whatever the game, Greenstein had success. Whether it was blackjack or roulette, Greenstein was a prodigious talent. To illustrate how much of a natural Greenstein is, later in life he spent a day in Dublin and bought a ticket in the Irish lottery. He even won some money there.
While receiving an education in high school, Barry would continue to increase and build up his bank roll at night. He then went on to college at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) where Greenstein decided to major in computer science. He earned his degree in less than four years. During his stay in college, he collected many thousands of dollars on the side from his poker playing as well. He also met his now previous wife (who already had three children of her own), around this time as well.
Greenstein wanted to have full custody over the kids, so he put the rest of his education on hold and playing poker for a while, then moved to Silicon Valley. From here, he started toward the development Symantec, a new and fresh company. He and his then wife had 2 more children in 1987-88. With everything going on, Barry was still determined to do his absolute best to get things going and making his dreams come true. The software program that he was working on, Q&A, made product of the year in 1986 and is one of the most important achievements that he has completed to this day.
Throughout the years, Barry continued with his struggles and hard work. In the early 90's, he decided to stop working for Symantec and take up professional poker full time. He spent hours and hours playing at an online casino. This led to a fast growing bank roll, not to mention ever increasing skill on his part. During his first great mark in poker when he entered a 36 person event in Las Vegas, Greenstein came out with an impressive prize of more than $8,000 in one night.
Over the course of that decade, he won numerous cash and prizes, until his big break in the year of 2003 - at the Hustler Casino when he made more than seven hundred thousand dollars and donated a large amount of the proceeds to charity, which is very admirable within itself. In 2008, he made out in 2nd in the WSOP standings, which is huge in anyone's book. Throughout the time to follow, he has made more steps toward a prominent and unyielding career in poker playing and has yet to stop anytime soon.