Rob Perelman, a seasoned poker player and pioneer in TV poker graphic display technology, currently finds himself in the main ballroom of the Chamada Prestige Resort for the 2024 WPT Prime Cyprus festival. I walk by him just as he’s standing up near a poker table. From a quick look at the board, it appears that his pocket fours have come up short in a flip against an opponent’s AK offsuit. Rob takes the beat like a champ, smiles, and wishes the remaining players at the table good luck.
Originally from San Diego, California, Rob now resides in Austin, Texas, after having spent several years living in Las Vegas, Arizona, and Canada. Rob’s passion for travel often takes him on the road, and Cyprus is the 51st country in the world he’s visited. He might now live a short drive from The Lodge and other poker rooms in Texas, but Rob prefers to only play poker while traveling. “There are just too many distractions at home,” he says. For him, traveling and playing in poker tournaments is not just about the game; it’s about immersing himself fully in the experience and lifestyle.
Image credit: WPT Flickr
The “Peak Amateur” and His Unique Approach to Poker
Known to many in the poker community as “The Peak of All Amateurs,” a title conferred upon him years ago by his friend Joseph Cheong, Rob embraces the label. Despite having won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker over the last couple decades, Rob doesn’t consider himself a professional and doesn’t engage in the rigorous study that many pros do. In his own words, “I don’t even truly enjoy playing, I just think that I’m good at it.”
Rob’s poker journey began almost by accident. During his time touring with bands, he found himself with a lot of free time between tours. One day, back in 2003, a friend introduced him to an online poker room called Golden Palace Poker. “They had free sit n’ gos that awarded 5 cents, 3 cents and 2 cents,” Rob recalls. “I quite literally built my bankroll from those freerolls. Here and there I would play dollar-entry tournaments. Only once did I ever make a deposit, and that was $100 on Full Tilt Poker, which I eventually turned into about $4,000.”
That success helped fuel Rob’s love for the game. During that period, he was deeply invested in the poker world, running home games in San Diego and consuming every poker TV show and poker book he could find.
A Chance Meeting that Changed Everything
Rob’s journey into the world of televised poker was serendipitous. He met a man named Kelly, who was involved in televised poker broadcasts. Kelly invited Rob to help out with some work in Los Angeles, which led to Rob becoming an integral part of the crew that worked on almost every major TV poker show over the next decade. Rob’s background in programming, which he had pursued as a hobby since high school, proved invaluable in this new role.
Rob had never sought out a career in programming, preferring to avoid the traditional office environment. However, his skills were crucial when he joined Kelly’s team. “I fixed a bunch of his code, and we ended up building the graphics engine that powered TV poker broadcasts for years; quite literally from scratch,” Rob remembers. His contributions were groundbreaking; the company was the first to manufacture its own RFID cards and was ahead of its time in live streaming. While Rob actively tracked stats for those shows, his software innovations became the foundation for many of the features that are now standard in poker broadcasts.
Meeting the Legends of Poker
Working on televised poker shows gave Rob the unique opportunity to meet many of the game’s greatest players. The first pro he encountered was Phil Laak, who memorably told Rob “you have the coolest job in the world.” Rob’s work put him in the room for some of the most iconic moments in poker history, such as Tom Dwan’s million-dollar bluff against Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth running it four times against loose cannon Ernest Wiggins in PokerStars’ The Big Game, and Jamie Gold’s kings versus aces hand against Sam Farha. Rob’s team was a third-party company outsourced by Poker Productions, Mori Eskandani’s company, which meant they were involved in almost every major poker show, including the $25k NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship and the old Mansion Poker Dome Challenge, for which they won an Emmy Award.
“The was such a cool show,” reflects Rob about the Mansion Poker Dome Challenge. “We’d come set up on Friday, shoot on Saturday, and then work for a week on producing and editing the show, adding features throughout the broadcast, like number of outs at the top of the screen – we were the first ones to do that! All the kinds of stuff that is standard now in a stream or edited show, we invented all of it through experimentation.”
Life After the Poker Boom: Time to Use That Passport
Working on all those poker shows is why Rob moved to Vegas, but the gravy train stopped when Black Friday hit. Luckily for Rob, however, just a few months earlier, in January 2011, he had had his biggest poker score ever, winning the Heartland Poker Tour $1,100 Las Vegas Main Event for over $158,000. This financial cushion allowed him to navigate the turbulent times that followed.
With the poker industry in turmoil, Rob decided to travel the world, taking on freelance gigs whenever his talents were needed for poker broadcasts. His nomadic lifestyle took him to countries where the cost of living was low, allowing him to stretch his earnings further. Rob spent significant time in Budapest, living frugally while continuing to work on poker shows.
Rob’s love of travel persists and is evident in his HendonMob profile. His travels are often guided to a degree by poker tournament schedules, as they provide a structured activity to fill his time when choosing which new countries and cities to explore. After wrapping up his time here in Cyprus, Rob plans to visit Estonia, Sweden, and Poland before returning to Austin. His future travel plans include a potential visit to Manila for the APPT event and possibly a trip to Cambodia.
Grateful for a Longstanding Relationship with Matt Savage
While in Cyprus, Rob could often be seen hanging out with Matt Savage, the World Poker Tour’s Executive Tour Director, whom he first befriended back in 2005. Their first meeting was during a live poker show in Monte Carlo, where Rob and his team were working tirelessly to perfect their graphics system for a broadcast of an event where Savage was serving as tournament director. For a few years after that, Rob dipped his toes into poker media, dabbling in poker tournament reporting at events overseen by Matt, such as the LAPC in Los Angeles and the Bay 101 series in Northern California.
READ MORE: Inside Matt Savage’s WPT Prime Cyprus Experience
As far as “poker goals” Rob doesn’t really have anything specific he still aspires to. “Back when I won the Heartland Poker Tour Event, to me that was like the pinnacle; I was playing $300 and $500 buy-in events and that was a $1k buy-in. I took a shot and got lucky to win. I won outright, no deal. I had sold a little action, but essentially I kept all the money from that. It doesn’t really get any better than that; televised final table. Just finishing in 6th place in that tournament would’ve been my best cash of all time.”
Thinking further back to good poker memories, Rob couldn’t help but express his gratitude and share another special poker story involving Savage. “I’ve been very lucky poker-wise, I’ve gotten to play the WSOP Main Event a handful of times and even cashed in it my first time, but I’ve never cashed since.”
“That first time was pretty special,” Rob continued. “Back in 2009, I was hanging out with Matt at a charity poker event in downtown Las Vegas, and he encouraged me to play in a $500 satellite.” Giving Rob a complete freeroll, Matt said ‘if you win the seat, I’ll take 60% of your Main Event action and you get 40%.’ Well, Rob won that freeroll and parlayed it into a 530th place finish for a $23k score. “It doesn’t get much better than a free $9k in your pocket!” Rob exclaimed.
Conclusion: A Poker Life Well-Traveled
After having found a bag on Day 1A, when those pocket fours couldn’t hold up Rob ended up getting eliminated on Day 2 of the WPT Prime Cyprus Championship event, finishing in 87th place for $2,480. While the money’s not huge, he’s quite content to have just secured his eighth flag for his HendonMob profile. In a life rich with travel and a multitude of great experiences on and off the felt, Rob Perelman does indeed embody the spirit of a true “peak amateur”. Having left an indelible mark on the game that poker fans around the world enjoy watching on screen, his next adventures await.
