Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya is the founder and CEO of Social Capital. He is an Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, and SPAC sponsor. He was an early Facebook senior executive, serving from 2007 to 2011. Following his departure from Facebook, he founded The Social+Capital Partnership, through which he invested in a number of companies, including Yammer and Slack. Also, he co-hosts the tech podcast All In.

He is an active participant in high-stakes cash games and live tournament events.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Early Life

Chamath Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka on September 3, 1976. Chamath’s family is from Galle, and his father Gamage was posted to the High Commission of Sri Lanka in Ottawa, where he moved his family when Chamath was five years old. Five years later, in 1986, the posting ended, and the family applied for refugee status rather than return home, citing Gamage’s criticism of the violence during the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Palihapitiya’s father was frequently unemployed, and his mother worked low-paying housekeeping jobs. He then began working at Burger King at 14 to support his family.

He went to the Lisgar Collegiate Institute. Palihapitiya worked as a derivatives trader at the investment bank BMO Nesbitt Burns for a year after graduating from the University of Waterloo in 1999 with a degree in electrical engineering. He then accepted a position at Winamp and relocated to California.

Chamath learned how to play poker from his first boss after graduating from school. So he taught him poker, and he fell in love with the game, spending a lot of time and money trying to master it. It’s an incredible game, and he highly recommends that everyone learn to play it. It’s a wonderful combination of risk, psychology, and game theory.

Chamath Palihapitiya’s Live Tournament Participation

In terms of live tournament participation, he has appeared in six World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour events. His first recorded tournament was in June 2011 at the 42nd World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, where he finished 15th and earned $30,122. In July of the same year, he competed in another WSOP event, finishing 101st out of 6,865 participants and earning $54,851.

In June 2012, he competed in another World Series of Poker event, the $5,000 No Limit Hold’em (Event #50). The 43rd World Series of Poker is being held in Las Vegas. He came in 11th place and earned $53,728. The winner of that event was an American poker player named Peter Vilandos, who took home $952,694.

Chamath then entered the World Poker Tour in March 2013.  He competed in the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star in San Jose and finished 35th, earning $22,670.

In terms of his most recent tournament appearance and participation, he was last seen competing at the 54th World Series of Poker in Las Vegas in June 2023, where he finished 81st and earned $6,852.

Chamath’s Poker Journey In High-Stakes Cash Games

Chamath first appeared in high-stakes cash games in 2016 at S4: Thunder Valley Resort #2’s Poker Night USA Episode 34. During his first appearance, he lost $30,700.

In 2021, he appeared in seven high-stakes cash games, including Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker. Chamath earned a total of 54,500 in Episodes 4 and 5 of Poker After Dark. Then he suffered a -$62,800 loss in PAD Episodes 6 and 7.

He began playing high-stakes poker in February 2021. He lost another $22,400 in S8 Episode 9 but made a comeback in Episode 10 and won $102,700. In that episode, he played with well-known poker players such as Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Brandon Adams, Phil Hellmuth, and others.

Chamath’s most recent appearance and participation in high-stakes cash games came on February 13, 2023, at Episode 375 of the popular live-streamed cash game Hustler Casino Live. Not bad for his first time; he earned $361,500 against Stanley Tang, Alan Keating, Phil Hellmuth, and others.