 Name: Howard 'The Chessmaster' Lederer Date of Birth: unknown Place of Birth: unknown Profile
They call him The Chessmaster or The Professor. It’s not because Howard Lederer is the son of college professor, Richard Lederer, author of “Anguished English,” an authoritative tome on the eccentricities of the English language. It’s because of Howard Lederer’s unique approach to professional tournament poker—methodical, statistical and analytical—as if he was dissecting the latest mathematical theory. Quiet and thoughtful, he always appears to be calculating. Clearly his calculations have paid off. Last year on the WPT tour, Lederer won the PartyPoker.com Million and Foxwood’s World Poker Finals. He is considered one of the game’s best high-stakes players.Raised in the rarified air of academia, where the senior Lederer was an instructor at a top prep school, St. Paul’s School in New Hamsphire, Howard was one of three siblings who have distinguished themselves. His sister Annie Duke ranks alongside him as one of the world’s leading poker pros, and Katy Lederer, a noted poet, recently published a memoir of living in the competitive Lederer household: Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers. It was chess, not poker, however that first captivated Howard.Lederer attended St. Paul’s, where he became a highly regarded national chess player, and then began classes at the age of 18 at Columbia University in New York City. But once in the city, he was drawn to the downtown chess clubs and their unique breed of oddball intellectuals. But he didn’t start skipping classes until he discovered real-life underground poker in New York, realistically depicted in the film “Rounders.” Lured by the high-risk nature of the game, Lederer quickly made his mark and quit school for good. For 10 years he made a living in the New York poker back rooms until moving to Las Vegas in 1994 to make his income in the major casinos. He now plays the circuit of high stakes poker globally, including the World Poker events, and, of course, the World Championship, where he won his bracelet in 2001.Poker is still a family business with Lederer; his wife Susan manages the poker room at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
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