Bryan Devonshire has been plying his trade as an online poker pro well before the poker boom began in 2003, first as a live Prop Player in Colorado where he also worked on a Search and Rescue team, and later as a live tournament and online tournament poker pro. Devonshire has been a sponsored pro at Ultimate Bet Poker for a number of years, and is one of the true nice guys in the poker world – a term usually saved for a calling station or whale, and not generally attributed to a player with nearly $2 million in tournament winnings!

Devonshire has produced a number of online poker training videos for the Daniel Negreanu-led PokerVT.com online poker training site, most dealing with his particular area of expertise, which is of course tournament poker! Although Devonshire touches on other disciplines as well, including his latest training videos, an in-depth look at the HORSE poker games at PokerStars.

Known to his friends as “Devo” Devonshire has had phenomenal success in live tournaments despite never really breaking through with a huge win. The San Dimas, California born Devonshire –yes, San Dimas, California as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure—has been calling Colorado home for many years now, and despite his poker success he still lives in Colorado where he got his start playing poker.

As of now his biggest tournament payday was in the 2008 WPT World Poker Challenge where he finished in second place to poker pro Lee Markholt, pocketing $271k. Devonshire also has two runner-up finishes at the WSOP; the first came in the 2006 WSOP Casino Employee event where he won $66k, and then the following year he once again finished as the bridesmaid in the $1,500 Omaha 8 or better tournament at the World Series of Poker to Alexander Kravchenko, this time pocketing $140k. In 2010 he finally got the monkey off his back when he won the WSOP Circuit Series Main Event in San Diego for his first major tournament victory.

To date Devonshire has won over $1.2 million in live tournament poker, and has over $700k in winnings at the online poker tournament tables to his credit. But the real reason the poker world loves Bryan Devonshire is for stories like this one, which he recounted for his UB Poker profile page, and many others you can listen to in the PokerRoad.com archives where “Devo” is one of the sites most beloved hosts:

“In Cripple Creek, CO, I was working as a prop sitting in seat 3,” Devonshire tells us. “In seat 2 was this scruffy, dirty old cowboy or miner dude with a leather hat, perma-scruff, 8 teeth, accent like you’d expect, overalls, the works. In seat 4 was this woman who looked like she stepped out of a brothel. Late ‘30s, huge bust, low cut shirt, slightly overweight, blonde, you get the picture. The cowboy stands up, lights a cigarette with a match, and the head of the match pops off the matchstick, on fire by the way, and heads straight for the lady of the night’s chest. Direct hit, right down the chute. If she had spilled any booze her bra probably would have went up in flames. You can imagine the pandemonium. The cowboy didn’t seem to give a damn and by the time the floorman returns from wherever the hell he was, she was rubbing ice cubes all over her chest. Needless to say, he ran upstairs to check the cameras in order to get a better view. Who can blame him?”