Ted Forrest: Professional Poker Player Profile

Player Snapshot

Full name	William Edward “Ted” Forrest
Nationality	American
Date of birth	September 24, 1964
Hometown / base	Syracuse, NY (born) / Las Vegas, NV (resident)
Live tournament earnings	$6,407,365 (source: The Hendon Mob, verified May 2026)
WSOP bracelets	6 (source: WSOP.com, verified May 2026)
WPT titles	1
EPT titles	0
Other major titles	NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship (2006)
Playing style	Unorthodox / intuition-based / mixed-game specialist
Known nicknames	“Professor Backwards,” “The Suicide King,” “Spooky”
Sponsors / team	None current (verified May 2026)

Who Is Ted Forrest?

Ted Forrest holds six World Series of Poker bracelets across four different poker variants — a breadth of dominance that places him in extremely rare company. His $6,407,365 in verified live tournament earnings (The Hendon Mob, May 2026) represents only part of the picture: Forrest spent the better part of a decade away from tournament poker entirely, competing in some of the most consequential high-stakes cash games in the game’s recorded history. He is the man chronicled as “The Suicide King” in Michael Craig’s definitive account of the Andy Beal sessions, a label that captures something true about how he plays poker and how he moves through the world.

In an era when Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey became the sport’s most recognisable names, Forrest was winning bracelets in razz, Omaha Hi-Lo, and seven-card stud — formats that separated genuine poker thinkers from specialists in the most popular variant. Poker Hall of Famer John Hennigan made the case publicly in early 2025 that Forrest remains one of the most compelling omissions from the Hall: six bracelets across four games, a WPT title, decades of documented dominance in the biggest cash games in Las Vegas, and a competitive philosophy that challenged every conventional assumption about how poker should be played.

What makes Forrest genuinely distinctive among his generation is not any single result but the consistency of his contrarianism. He earned the nickname “Professor Backwards” by advocating — and demonstrating — that limping preflop is not a weakness but a weapon, that calling a raise can be as powerful as three-betting, and that the conventional playbook exists to be studied and discarded. That same disposition extended to the rest of his life, producing a career that no profile quite does justice to if it stops at bracelet counts and prize pools.

Early Life and Path to Poker

Ted Forrest was born on September 24, 1964, in Syracuse, New York, where his father taught English at LeMoyne College, a Jesuit institution in the city. The athletic side of Forrest’s character was apparent early: he competed in wrestling, track and field, and basketball during his school years. An early solo camping trip to the Grand Canyon at sixteen — undertaken without telling his family, resulting in a confrontation with park rangers and a bus ride to St. Louis after a series of misadventures — became a formative story about self-reliance and quick thinking under pressure. It is the kind of story Forrest tells without drama, as though testing limits was simply what one did.

After leaving for the Southwest at around twenty, Forrest worked at a hotel near the Grand Canyon and began making weekend trips to Las Vegas to play in modest poker games. He won enough to finance a college education, returning to LeMoyne — his father’s institution — to study. He left nine credits short of a degree after his father died, and never went back. His description of that decision, as reported in Card Player magazine’s 2006 profile of him, was straightforward: if he had graduated, he might have taken a conventional job and never returned to poker. He considered that the worse outcome. He moved to Las Vegas full-time with his girlfriend Karen in 1987 and began his career.

His first Las Vegas weeks were lean by any standard. A 2006 Card Player profile described him arriving with $100 to his name, surviving on minimal food, and accepting a job as a prop player at the Palace Station casino for $30 a day plus one meal. From that position, Forrest began his ascent. He ran forty-three consecutive winning months as a cash game player — a streak that established his reputation in the local game before he had entered a single major tournament. The defining early moment came in 1991, when a backer arranged for him to play in a high-stakes razz session at the Bicycle Casino against wealthy but inexperienced opponents. Forrest typically played seven-card stud, fell behind early, and then fought back across twenty-five hours to walk away with over $20,000. He described it as the turning point: the bankroll and the confidence arrived together.

Career Timeline and Breakthrough

First significant results (1992–1993)

Before the 1993 World Series of Poker, Forrest had already been winning. In 1992 he took two events at the LA Poker Classic and one at the World Poker Finals in Mashantucket, Connecticut — a strong multi-format performance that signalled genuine tournament ability. But nothing prepared the poker world for what happened at Binion’s Horseshoe in the summer of 1993.

Over three consecutive days, Forrest won three separate WSOP bracelet events: the $1,500 Seven-Card Razz, the $1,500 Omaha Hi-Lo Split-8 or Better, and the $5,000 Seven-Card Stud. The total prize across the three victories was approximately $312,400. Three bracelets in a single WSOP is a feat that has been accomplished by only three players in history — Forrest, Phil Hellmuth, and Phil Ivey — and Forrest did it in that first summer he announced himself at the top level. His $5,000 Seven-Card Stud win came over a final table that included Chip Reese and Howard Lederer.

Into the cash games (mid-1990s to 2003)

After 1993, Forrest made a decision that was entirely consistent with his character: he largely stepped back from tournaments and went to work in the biggest cash games he could find. The live tournament circuit in the mid-1990s was a fraction of its post-boom size, and Forrest calculated — correctly — that his edge was larger and more consistently exploitable in cash games. He posted six WSOP final tables during this period without ever making a bracelet his primary target. His reputation in the side games at the Bellagio and in Los Angeles’s biggest rooms grew into something that few peers questioned: Barry Greenstein, in a quote attributed to him across multiple poker publications, described playing short-handed seven-card stud with Forrest as being in the eye of a hurricane.

The Andy Beal sessions — documented in Michael Craig’s 2005 book The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King — represent the peak expression of this period. Between 2001 and 2004, a consortium of elite Las Vegas professionals (known informally as The Corporation) rotated against Texas billionaire Andy Beal in heads-up matches at limits ranging from $10,000/$20,000 to $100,000/$200,000. Forrest was a member of that group alongside Reese, Ivey, Lederer, and others. His nickname in Craig’s account — the Suicide King — reflected a specific incident in which Forrest, without any financial partners or syndicate backing, walked into a match between Beal and Reese and essentially took on the world’s most dangerous heads-up opponent solo. Whether he won or lost that particular session matters less than what the act revealed: Forrest played the most uncomfortable, highest-stakes situation he could find, and chose to do it alone.

Return and second peak (2004–2007)

In 2004, when the poker boom had swelled tournament fields to sizes that justified Forrest’s return, he re-entered competitive tournament poker and promptly won two more WSOP bracelets — a Seven-Card Stud event and a No-Limit Hold’em event — bringing his total to five. That No-Limit Hold’em bracelet came against a field of over 800 players, demonstrating that his game extended well beyond the mixed-game and stud formats he was most associated with.

Two further landmark results followed. In March 2006, Forrest won the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship at Caesar’s Palace, defeating Erik Seidel, Chad Brown, Sammy Farha, and Chris Ferguson in succession to claim the $500,000 first prize. One year later, in March 2007, he won the World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Stars event in San Jose — $1,100,000, still his largest live tournament cash — after surviving what became the longest heads-up duel in WPT history against J.J. Liu.

Sixth bracelet and beyond (2014–present)

After a quieter period in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Forrest returned to the WSOP in 2014 and claimed his sixth bracelet in the $1,500 Seven-Card Razz event. The heads-up duel to close it out was against Phil Hellmuth — who was seeking his fourteenth bracelet — and lasted over four hours. Forrest overcame a chip deficit multiple times before winning. It was, as WSOP.com noted at the time, the kind of match the poker world had long wanted to see. Hellmuth, to his credit, was gracious afterward.

As of February 2026, Forrest recorded a cash at a tournament in the United States — his 147th career cash per The Hendon Mob — at age 61. He was nominated for the Poker Hall of Fame in 2025, with Hennigan publicly making the case for his induction. That year’s inductee was Nick Schulman, but Forrest’s candidacy drew genuine and documented support within the poker community.

Key Titles and Biggest Results

Event	Year	Finish	Prize	Notes
WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars	2007	1st	$1,100,000	Longest HU duel in WPT history vs J.J. Liu
NBC National Heads-Up Championship	2006	1st	$500,000	Defeated Seidel, Farha, Ferguson en route
WSOP $1,500 Seven-Card Razz	2014	1st	$121,196	Sixth bracelet; defeated Phil Hellmuth heads-up
WSOP $5,000 Seven-Card Stud	1993	1st	~$130,000 (est.)	Over final table including Chip Reese
WSOP $1,500 Omaha Hi-Lo	1993	1st	~$90,000 (est.)	Second bracelet of 1993 WSOP
WSOP $1,500 Seven-Card Razz	1993	1st	~$90,000 (est.)	First bracelet of 1993 WSOP
WSOP $2,000 No-Limit Hold’em	2004	1st	N/A (verified via WSOP.com)	Fifth bracelet; 800+ player field
WSOP $5,000 Seven-Card Stud	2004	1st	N/A (verified via WSOP.com)	Fourth bracelet

Note: Exact prize amounts for individual 1993 and 2004 bracelet events are not individually verified to a single primary source. Figures marked “est.” reflect the approximate scale of prize pools for events of that type and buy-in in the relevant year. The fact of the bracelet wins is verified via WSOP.com.

Taken together, Forrest’s results tell the story of a player who operates best under the most difficult conditions — heads-up, mixed-game, against the deepest fields — and who disappeared from the tournament circuit for years without it costing him his edge. The 2014 return for a sixth bracelet, a full decade after his fifth, is the statistic that most clearly separates him from players whose wins cluster in a single era.

Playing Style and Strategic Identity

The nickname “Professor Backwards” is not a joke about preflop calling frequencies; it is a description of a coherent strategic philosophy. Forrest has repeatedly stated across interviews and public appearances that limping and calling raises are not inherently weak plays, and that the conventional raise-or-fold preflop framework discards significant expected value in the right circumstances. His no-limit Texas Hold’em approach, as documented across multiple poker publications, explicitly diverges from the dominant consensus of the modern era.

This inversion extends deeper than preflop mechanics. Forrest is widely regarded as a reader of people rather than a solver of ranges. His nickname “Spooky” — the other one — comes from peers who noticed that he would make calls or folds in spots where no mathematical analysis justified the play, and be right at a frequency that exceeded noise. Card Player’s extended profile of him from 2006 described a player whose skill lived in his ability to simulate hand ranges mentally while simultaneously reading physical and timing tells with unusual precision.

In mixed games — razz in particular — Forrest is considered by many peers to be the best practitioner the game has seen. John Hennigan’s 2025 op-ed for PokerNews described Forrest as “generally regarded as the greatest razz player of all time,” a reputation built over decades of high-stakes competition that rarely made headlines because razz rarely makes headlines. His six WSOP bracelets across four different variants (Hold’em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Seven-Card Stud, and Razz) demonstrate a range of technical competence that is not common even among multi-bracelet winners.

At final tables, Forrest is patient when trailing and aggressive when he has cover. The 2014 Hellmuth heads-up match was illustrative: down in chips multiple times over four hours, he consistently refused to take marginal spots and waited for situations he wanted. He won.

Online Poker and Cash Games

Forrest played on Full Tilt Poker under the screen name “Profbackwards” — a natural digital extension of his “Professor Backwards” identity. His online activity has not been tracked to major public results in the way that some contemporaries’ has.

His more significant off-tournament impact came in the live cash game environment. As a member of The Corporation that faced Andy Beal in sessions at the Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas between 2001 and 2004, Forrest participated in games with limits that reached $100,000/$200,000. He has described winning and losing over a million dollars in single sessions of poker and craps. His role in the Beal sessions — including the “bum-rushing” of a Reese–Beal match detailed in Craig’s book — is among the most documented accounts of his approach to risk.

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Beyond the Felt

Forrest’s most talked-about off-felt activity is his prop betting, which has ranged from the athletic to the extraordinary. He ran a marathon in Las Vegas in 115-degree heat to win $7,000. He performed a standing backflip at the WSOP to win $10,000. A bet involving bench-pressing 225 pounds fifty times in twenty-four hours resulted in a permanent arm injury and a $10,000 loss. These bets are not frivolous anecdotes — they are an accurate expression of a personality that cannot separate money from action and does not find comfort in caution.

The most consequential prop bet of Forrest’s career, and the one that generates significant search interest, was a 2010 wager with Mike Matusow. Forrest, weighing approximately 188 pounds, bet Matusow that he could reach under 140 pounds by a specified deadline. Matusow accepted at heavily favourable odds: $1 million against Forrest’s $100,000 by one date, and a further $1 million against $50,000 by a second, earlier date. Forrest reached the weight by the earlier deadline — ESPN confirmed the official weigh-in at 137.5 pounds in July 2010 — entitling him to the full $2 million. At the time, Matusow told ESPN he had not believed the feat was medically possible and had accepted partly because he lacked the funds to pay if he lost. Over the following years, a public dispute unfolded: Forrest stated publicly on social media that as of September 2014, Matusow had paid approximately $70,500 of the $1.8 million he held responsible for. Matusow disputed the terms and characterisation. The remainder of the debt, to the public record’s knowledge, was not settled. Both parties have addressed the matter only through media and social channels; no court judgment on the prop bet specifically has been reported.

Forrest appeared on the first two seasons of the GSN series High Stakes Poker and in seasons of the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament. He is known within the poker community for staking other players — sometimes players in losing streaks — funded by his own winnings, a generosity that has been noted by multiple peers and has at various points reportedly contributed to financial strain.

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Controversies and Complex Reputation

In September 2016, an arrest warrant was issued for Forrest in Las Vegas Justice Court, covering two felony charges: drawing and passing a check without sufficient funds with intent to defraud, and theft. The charges related to two checks totalling $215,000 that Forrest allegedly attempted to pass at Wynn Las Vegas in October 2012 and May 2013. Court records indicate that Forrest signed a confession of judgment in 2013 acknowledging a debt of $270,000 to Wynn and agreed to a payment schedule, but did not comply with it. Forrest appeared in court in September 2016 and was released. His attorney, Chris Rasmussen, disputed the criminal characterisation, arguing publicly that the transaction was a casino credit arrangement rather than a criminal matter. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the case as ultimately closed; no conviction has been reported in public court records.

Separately, the Mirage casino obtained a civil judgment against Forrest in 2016 for approximately $54,000 relating to an unpaid loan. Court filings also showed foreign judgments filed in Nevada by the Borgata, Trump Plaza, and Hustler Casino over separate unpaid casino markers. Forrest’s attorney maintained that these were civil credit disputes. Whether and how these debts were resolved is not fully documented in the public record.

Forrest has also been noted as a former stakeholder in UltimateBet, the online poker site that was the subject of an insider cheating scandal. His ownership position was reported by poker industry journalists at the time of the scandal’s coverage. No allegations of personal involvement in the cheating were made against Forrest.

The composite picture — a player who gave away money generously, lost it freely, and faced genuine financial difficulty in the years after the poker boom — is more complicated than either his admirers or critics tend to make it. Both things are verifiable: the generosity and the consequences.

Current Status and What to Watch

Ted Forrest, age 61, remains active on the tournament circuit. His most recent recorded cash per The Hendon Mob was on February 20, 2026 — a modest result but confirmation that he is still playing. His 2025 Poker Hall of Fame nomination, publicly championed by John Hennigan and supported by peers across multiple generations, reflects a genuine recognition of how much of his career unfolded away from cameras and official results pages.

The Hall of Fame vote went to Nick Schulman in 2025. Forrest’s candidacy will likely return. His six bracelets across four variants, his role in the highest-stakes documented cash games in poker history, and three decades of active competition at the highest levels make the case more or less on its own. The question is timing rather than merit.

For a poker fan, the thing to watch is whether Forrest makes a run at a seventh bracelet in one of the mixed-game events at the WSOP — formats where his edge remains as real as it was in 1993.

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