Before this win, Philip Tom was perhaps better known as the father of Scott Tom.

Scott Tom is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Absolute Poker. Scott Tom and his Ivy League friends started Absolute Poker in 2003 using funds put up by their fathers.

In 2007 Absolute Poker was rocked by a cheating scandal. Though Philip Tom’s image was untarnished his son Scott was involved.  Scott was believed to have opened a super-user account with the ID Potripper and used it to siphon off millions of dollars from regular players. The licensors of Absolute Poker, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission had to step in. Their audit confirmed the case of insider cheating but concluded that the beneficiary was not the online poker site but Tom Scott the owner of the Potripper identity. Nevertheless Absolute Poker was fined $500,000 for breach of regulations.

Philip Tom of Las Vegas, Nevada, won WSOP 2008 Event #11, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold'em Shootout. He thus continued the run of “virgin bracelet winners” at WSOP 2008. No winner so far at WSOP 2008 has ever won a bracelet before. Along with the coveted bracelet Tom received a prize of $477,900.

In fact Tom’s victory came as a surprise because his poker report card is nothing to write home about. His best WSOP performance before this event was a poor 30 rank finish, which came in WSOP 2008 in the Mixed Hold’em Event held last week. His best performance in any major tournament is not much better at a rank of 22.

All six players at the final table started off with a stack of about a million chips. The others at the table were Greg Mueller of Canada, Thomas Roupe of Texas, Leo Wolpert of Virginia, Timothy West of California and Sirous Jamshidi of Pennsylvania. Mueller started playing aggressively and after the first 60 hands was coasting to a comfortable lead with over 2 million chips, while the other players were floundering. After 104 hands Roupe was the first to go. He staked almost everything he had against Mueller with pocket eights only to find Mueller with pocket nines.

In the next deal he went broke. Then eliminations followed in fairly quick succession. The next to go was West followed soon by Jamshidi. Meanwhile Tom and Wolpert had made some gains and only 300,000 chips separated the third from the first. It was then that the luck turned for Tom. He won six hands in a row and at the break for dinner he was leading 3,165,000 to Mueller's 1,999,000 and Wolpert's 845,000. Wolpert played aggressively but had to exit when he had staked all in a deal against Mueller and lost narrowly. In the heads up it was Tom all the way. Mueller could never catch up. In the last deal played Mueller needed an eight on the river but got a king and was knocked out. This was the second time Mueller has lost in a heads up in a WSOP event and settle for second place.