Best known for winning the main event of the 2005 World Series of Poker, Joe Hachem, born November 3, 1966, is a Lebanese-Australian professional poker player. He went on to win his first World Poker Tour title at the Bellagio Casino’s Five Diamonds Poker Classic the next year, earning $2.2 million. With competition prize money more than $10.5 million as of October 2009, Hachem is now the fifth highest ranked player in live tournament career earnings.
Hachem and his family moved from Lebanon to Australia in 1972. He is married and has four children. He finished tenth in a World Series event prior to his big win, where he won US$25,850. In 2005 he outlasted 5,618 players to win $7,500,000 in the WSOP $10,000 no limit Texas Hold’em Main Event. Joe Hachem was not an Internet qualifier: according to his poker player profile he paid the full buy-in when he won the 2005 WSOP Hold em Poker Tournament.
Hachem’s poker player profile veered off the norm in 2008 when he became part of the cast of Pass the Sugar, a documentary about the final table of the 2005 WSOP. The producers planned to document the nine players as they battled it out before Hachem scored what was the largest prize to come out of a single hold em poker tournament at the time. Pass the Sugar was released in 2009.
The WSOP winner also scored a small part in the horror movie Prey, about three couples on a 4-wheel-drive holiday wandering into an Aboriginal sacred site and awakened a 5000-year curse. Joe plays a hotel clerk who is playing poker online. The main characters interrupt his game at a crucial moment, and he goes off at them.
Hachem was a relative newcomer when he won in 2005 – almost unknown in the world of poker. He was a practicing chiropractor, but due to a rare blood disorder, he gave up his career and became a professional poker player. His grand finale at the 2005 WSOP was against another newcomer, Steve Dannenmann.
