Sam Greenwood’s Life: Biggest Profits, Losses, Private Life & Net Worth

06/04/2020

– General Information –

Sam Greenwood playing poker

Sam Greenwood is a Canadian professional poker player. He was born on October 11th, 1988 in Toronto, Canada.

After starting off as an online player, he’s become outstandingly successful in live tournaments, cashing for over $22.5 million during his career. He has won one WSOP gold bracelet so far, in the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event in 2015. In 2019, he made a deep run in the Main Event, eventually finishing in 45th place out of the 8,569 entrants for $212,000.

Greenwood has also played in Triton’s super high stakes live streamed cash games. His brother, Lucas Greenwood, is also a professional poker player.

– Key Career Dates –

2006: He starts playing online MTT’s on PokerStars.
2015: He wins his first WSOP gold bracelet in the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event for $318,977.
2018: He wins the €100,000 No Limit Hold’em EPT Super High Roller in Monte Carlo for €1.520 million. That is his biggest single live tournament cash to date.
2019: He makes a deep run in the WSOP Main Event, eventually finishing in 45th place for $211,945 in the 8,569-player field.

– Sam Greenwood’s Career –

→ Beginnings ←

Not much is known about Greenwood’s life before he found poker. All we know is that he worked as a stock trader before, and well after he started playing high stakes poker tourneys. Playing cards was never meant to be the main source of income for him.

In fact, he said this to pokernews.com in 2015, after winning his first WSOP gold bracelet:

“I’m a poker enthusiast. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve made some money with poker and I’m just looking for opportunities to invest it. I’m an entrepreneur.”

He started playing tracked online tournaments in October 2006. He used the flashy alias “Str8$$$Homey” on PokerStars. He became prominent in the poker world in his breakthrough year of 2015, when he final tabled the $100K PCA high roller and won a WSOP bracelet as well.

→ Live Tournaments ←

Greenwood’s Hendon page shows an outstanding $22.534 million in career earnings. That puts him within the top 25 on the website’s famous all time money list.

That sum is the product of 116 different cashes in live tournaments, over the course of 13 years.

The first recorded ITM finish on his tally is from October 2008. He finished 8th in a C$10,000 NLHE tournament at the North American Poker Championship, in his home country of Canada. He took home C$87,490. By that time, he was both a successful stock trader and online poker player, that’s why he could start at the C$10K events in live poker.

However, he only delivered scores on the live felt sporadically in the first few years. He had no cashes in 2009, and only two in 2010, both from the WSOP.

The first time he made a cash for nearly $100K in a live tourney was in 2013. He came in 2nd in the €5,000 Pot Limit Omaha EPT event in Prague for €72,300, which equaled to around $99,000 at the time.

As we wrote earlier, his breakthrough came in 2015. In January, he took 6th place for $396,920 in the $100K High Roller at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas. That star-studded field featured such poker greats as Bryn Kenney, Christoph Vogelsang, and the eventual winner Steve O’Dwyer. Greenwood even held the chiplead at the end of Day1.

That was the first time the poker media started covering him. However, his real big scores started pouring in in 2018.

In April of that year, he took down the €100K Super High Roller at EPT Monte Carlo for €1.52 million. That is the biggest single live tournament score of his career to date. He beat German poker pro Vogelsang heads-up for the title.

In the same month, he also won the €50K Super High Roller event for €1 million at the Madrid stop of partypoker LIVE.

Sam Greenwood after winning a game

Greenwood has been extremely successful at Triton Poker’s high rollers as well. In July 2018, he took 4th place in the HK$2,000,000 Triton Main Event for $1.472 million in Jeju, South Korea. In August 2019, he finished 5th in the £100K Main Event in London for £902,000. He also has a runner-up finish in the HK$750,000 Short Deck event at the 2019 Montenegro stop, for which he got no less than $1,095,625.

In January 2019, Greenwood bought in for the $100K PCA High Roller, the event he got his first major result in, once again. This time, he didn’t stop until he reached the top and won the tournament, pocketing $1.775 million.

→ World Series Of Poker ←

Sam Greenwood has won one WSOP gold bracelet so far.

He took down the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event for $318,977 in 2015. The same year, he final tabled in the $10,000 NLHE 6-Handed event. He came in 5th place and won $126,745. That final table featured some of poker’s biggest stars, such as Doug Polk or Fedor Holz.

In 2019, he made a deep run in the Main Event. He eventually got knocked out with a cracked pair of Aces in 45th place out of the 8,569 players entered. He got $211,945. That year Hossein Ensan from Germany won the ME title.

Overall, Greenwood has cashed in 25 World Series events for a combined $864,771.

→ Live Cash Games ←

In September 2018, Greenwood played in Triton’s Million Dollar Cash Game in Jeju, South Korea. The stakes were KRW3,000,000/6,000,000, which means that the big blind alone was worth around $5,000.

In this super high stakes game, he was able to bluff two flushes on the river, and take down a $236K pot with 6-high.

Greenwood played in Triton’s cash sessions a few more times after that as well.

→ Online Poker ←

As we wrote earlier, Greenwood started off as an online tournament player.

He played under the screen name “Str8$$$Homie” on PokerStars, “IfHeDiesHeDies” on Full Tilt, “DeanMalenko” on partypoker, and “FlatTopTony” on 888. Across these creatively named accounts, he accumulated $15.950 million in MTT winnings.

His earliest results are from October 2006. His biggest score is $548,769, which he got for winning a $25,000 NLHE Super High Roller on Natural8-GGNetwork in November 2020.

He also won a $2,100 NLHE SCOOP (Spring Championship of Online Poker) event for $377,280 in 2013. He has another SCOOP title from 2015, as well as a WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) title from 2009.

In December 2021, he cashed in 4 events at EPT Online on Stars, including an 8th place final table finish in the $10,300 NLHE 8-Max Progressive KO Super High Roller for $12,314. In the same month, he won the $5,200 Super Circut High Roller event at the WSOP Circuit Online on GG for $55,735.

→ Scandals ←

His criticism of German high stakes pros

In January 2018, Greenwood took to Twitter to call out the German professional players competing in some of the highest stakes poker tournaments in the world.

According to the Canadian poker pro, Germans like to lurk around a recently started high buy-in event and wait for recreational players to enter before they too buy in. He went on to call this behavior “predatory and cowardly”.

This isn’t just about what happened yesterday. Look at the Prague 50k. Two good recs were regged from the start and most of Team Germany hung around in the tourney room like vultures waiting for worse recs to join the tourney. It’s predatory and cowardly.

— Sam Greenwood (@SamGreenwoodRIO) January 29, 2018

Greenwood received quite a bit of backlash for his comments by German and non-German players alike. One of these players voicing his disagreement was Dietrich Fast from Germany.

It’s notable because he and Greenwood had another conflict years later. In January 2020, they were drawn to the same table in the A$10,600 Main Event at the Aussie Millions. In one hand, Fast decided to slowroll Greenwood.

“Slowrolling” means to pretend to have a worse hand at showdown, just to reveal the actual winning hand at the last moment before your opponent would take the pot. It’s considered very rude by professional poker etiquette.

Fast later apologized to Sam Greenwood on Twitter. In his apology, he admitted that he did it to revenge Greenwood’s bumhunting allegations from 2018. However, he now sees that he was right to call out this type of behavior and it was wrong to slowroll him.