David Benyamine Bio

David Benyamine is a professional poker player from Henderson, Nevada. He was born and raised in Paris, France, then came to America to pursue poker. As of now, he is engaged to another poker player, Erica Schoenberg, and has a daughter from a previous marriage.
As a young adult, Benyamine would work at his parents’ shops, which he disliked very much. He played a lot of professional tennis in his twenties. However, back pain would force him to retire from a promising career playing tennis and find less strenuous activities. That is when he began to play billiards and eventually found that he could make a living from playing poker.

Benyamine was first introduced to poker in 1999, by a friend who worked at a poker club. Ever since he started playing, he was constantly trying to improve himself. Benyamine considers himself a fighter and can put in very long sessions at the poker table, even when the luck runs bad enough to make most players quit. It was not long before he became a regular at the cash games and began to win numerous tournaments at the “Aviation Club”, an upscale casino in Paris. In a few short years, Benyamine rose to the top and became one of the most successful european players. When Isabelle Mercier worked as a poker room manager at the “Aviation Club”, she asked Benyamine if he ever read a poker book. He replied “No. Not once. Not even a poker magazine!”
In 2002, Benyamine went on a journey to Las Vegas to play cash games and tournaments with a proposal to get staked from backers. At the last minute, his backers left him stranded after he arrived in the States, so he took the $4,000 cash that he had in his pockets and went to play cash games. He managed to build that roll up to $300K before going back to France. Ever since that trip, Benyamine has been routinely flying to back America every year until he finally bought a house in Las Vegas.
The “Big Game” is a series of mixed poker games played in Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio, with limits reaching up to $4,000/$8,000. When Benyamine had enough money to sit down at the “Big Game”, he took shots at these ultra high stakes games and managed to profit very early on. He credits his Pot Limit Omaha experience in Europe as a main reason for taking on such a high risk attempt. In 2006, he was considered the biggest winner in the “Big Game”.
Even though Benyamine is a mostly cash game player, he has a lot of tournament success considering the low volume of tournaments he plays. In 2003, he won the Grand Prix de Paris, taking home $410K and a World Poker Tour title. Then in 2008, he won the World Series of Poker $10K Omaha Hi-Low split championship event, taking home $535K and his first gold bracelet. Since 2002, he has had over $1.3 million in tournament earnings.
Before 2002, he did not play any online poker at all. Then all of that changed when he became sponsored by a major online room, Full Tilt Poker. He could be seen playing more than 3 or 4 tables at any given instance on a busy night. Benyamine almost never strays from the highest limit tables such as $200/$400 Pot limit/No limit and $1,000/$2,000 limit. Near the end of 2007, he took some heavy losses in the “Big Game” and online, which prompted him to quit online poker for a few weeks. After returning to the online scene, he has accumulated $6 million in profits from dominating the Pot Limit Omaha tables over the course of June 2007 to June 2008.
It would be tough to find another poker player who is more dedicated than David Benyamine. If you want to see him in action, or even dare play against him, he can be found sitting on the biggest limit tables on Full Tilt Poker.