Joe Ingram Excelling in New Entrepreneurial Life

The $10,000 Pot Limit Omaha Championship played to a victor on PokerGO this past weekend but Poker Central’s PLO Week continues with the $25,000 Pot Limit Omaha High Roller, which is set to begin today, July 5^th. Before PLO Week officially concludes, and the poker world’s focus turns to the WSOP Main Event, which will be streamed on ESPN and PokerGO, the Poker Central Podcast caught up with Pot Limit Omaha authority Joe Ingram.

Describing Ingram as simply an authority on Pot Limit Omaha would be selling the living legend short, especially since Ingram no longer considers himself a poker player, first and foremost. Instead, Ingram has begun to use his skills, talents and resources to pursue a variety of other projects and businesses.

“It’s tough to excel at both.” Ingram said when asked about the balance between poker and his newfound entrepreneurial life. He went on to add, “I don’t really know how to balance it. Playing poker, staying really sharp, always thinking about it and studying your game; while at the same time, doing all this other stuff.”

Over the last few years, all of that other stuff has built Ingram a passionate fan base and following and solidified himself as one of the poker world’s best content creators. This spring, Ingram become a published author and earlier this year, Ingram’s Poker Life Podcast was named Podcast of the Year at the American Poker Awards.

It is safe to say that Ingram is excelling in his new ventures and while Ingram wants to try to keep a balance between both a poker and entrepreneurial life, an honest reflection with himself this summer has led Ingram to focus more on the later.

“It is interesting because you feel your understanding of certain situations is just not as quick as it used to be but that has come back as I’ve been playing more hands and trying to think about it a ton but with that, everything else has suffered.” Ingram said, noting that that everything else is his ventures away from the felt. “I guess there is probably a happy medium I can get to but I don’t know if there is a point to keep competing online.”

Outside of the challenges of high stakes online poker, Ingram admits that there is not a lot left to motivate him from a poker perspective. He mentioned that success in other ventures and businesses fill the void left from the high stakes Pot Limit Omaha grind. In the same breath, Ingram was sure to not forget his roots.

“At the same time, I do a lot of poker content, I talk about PLO, so I still want to be good at the game.” Ingram said, while also turning back the clock to when, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, the poker and entrepreneurial lives first collided. “That was the reason I started, I could merge those two things together.”

Those two things have come together nicely for Ingram but he hasn’t had the same success merging his high stakes cash game career to the tournament arena.

“In tournaments, I don’t know what the I’m doing,” Ingram joked, before projecting a trend of growth at the World Series of Poker. “As myself and more people, like JNandez, keep putting out more PLO content, more people are going to want to try PLO. Overall, it seems the events have been successful but I’m just happy to see PLO has been popular and successful.”

The only thing more popular than the great game over the last few years is potentially Pot Limit Omaha’s biggest supporter. While Joe Ingram may be stepping away from the game as a player, he will always carry that flag, along with many, many more.