Even though he looks like he’s bent on destruction at the table, people who know him up close say that he is in fact quite a personable character.
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1973, Tony G exhibited an early prowess in games that required logic and intuition. He was the Rubik’s Cube champion of Lithuania, until he moved to Australia, aged 11, together with his family.
He began playing poker at 18, and sure enough, results started flowing in soon. His first noteworthy achievement came in 2003, when he finished 5th in the Grand Prix de Paris, a WPT event. That event also marked his first conflict with a fellow poker professional. Howard Lederer got so offended by The Australian Airbag’s comments, that he refused to shake his hand when eliminated.
In June, the same year, he won tournaments in Russia, victories which made him about $20,000. That may have looked impressive for him back then, but the result he would later achieve would dwarf the significance of those events.
He continued his ascending form in the 2004 WSOP, where he cashed in two events as a prelude of much bigger things to come: he finished 2nd in the 2004 Grand Prix de Paris later that year, and earned $414,478.
In August 2005, he won a NL Holdem event in the European Poker Championships to take home 260,000 GPB.
2006 saw him winning the Bad Boys of Poker II WPT event, and finished second in the Intercontinental Poker Championship, for $150.
During that event, he unleashed an unusually aggressive assault directed to fellow professional Ralph Perry ( who ended up in 4th eventually, eliminated by Gouga), an act that drew harsh criticism even from the commentators of the event.
Still in 2006, he won the Betfair Asian Poker Tour for $ 451k (he donated half of that to charity).
In 2007, he came in third in NBC’s Poker After Dark once, and won a tournament in Moscow for $205k all of which he donated to charity, too.
Being the owner of a network of highly trafficked poker-information sites, he could afford to give more and more of his tourney winnings to charity, which is exactly what he did.
His total career live tournament winnings amount to about $2.5 million.
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