Photograph by Mark Gilliland
Dennis Phillips isn’t your average millionaire. He’s already received a check for more than $900,000 from the World Series of Poker just for making this month’s Main Event Final Table. If he can beat out eight other card sharks in Vegas on November 9, he’ll take home $8 million more. Still, he has no plans to quit his job—or to move out of his friend’s basement.
“He travels a lot,” Phillips explains of his roommate. “So I’ve got my privacy. And there’s a pool table and a large-screen TV. It’s very relaxing. Why would I move? He does require me to restock the bar, though.”
The 53-year-old Cards fan lives just east of the river in Cottage Hills, Ill., and works as an account manager at a St. Louis trucking company. He’ll keep on working there, he says, regardless of how much dough he rakes in from his poker-playing prowess. “That’s my personal choice,” he says. “I like to keep busy.”
Phillips started playing serious poker about four years ago. This year, he decided to take the plunge and bought into a $200-ante qualifying tournament at Harrah’s in Earth City. He won, went to Vegas for the World Series of Poker and then just kept on winning, beating out 6,835 other players to wind up in the “November Nine.” Going into the Final Table, the man in the St. Louis Cardinals cap is the chip leader (at almost $26.3 million—nearly $2 million more than second place) and the odds-on favorite.
And if the humble Midwesterner makes an early exit from the tournament, “I’ll dance a jig to the door,” he says. “They gave me a million bucks. How can I complain? And if I win it all, then I may dance a jig on the ceiling.”
