Parker Talbot
In little over a decade, Parker Talbot has grown into one of the most loved – and feared – poker players on the planet.
After starting to play while studying at Ottawa University, it wasn’t long before online poker had become Parker’s full-time job. Playing under ‘tonkaaaa’, a username based on a hockey nickname likening Talbot to a toy truck, he swiftly became a high-stakes Hyper-Turbo Sit & Go regular.
After briefly falling out of love with the game, Talbot switched his attention to the poker streaming scene on Twitch. It was through streaming that Talbot rediscovered his passion for poker, and he became an early phenomenon in the poker streaming circuit, building his loyal ‘Team NeverLucky’ community to thousands of viewers a night in just a matter of months.
His name was truly catapulted into stardom when he defeated the legendary Phil Hellmuth in a live heads-up match. Hellmuth is a 16-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) champion, and Talbot’s victory cemented him as a prominent name in the new wave of poker entertainers taking the game by storm.
Talbot shrewdly opted to take a period of time out from his Twitch and YouTube content creation to focus on improving his game, a move which paid off in spades when he took 6th place in the European Poker Tour (EPT) Prague Main Event in 2018 for €179,360. His online results became more significant too, and he began regularly posting six-figure scores and racking up cashes into the millions.
Since realising his dream of joining PokerStars Team Pro, and subsequently returning to streaming, Parker has collected two World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) titles and an EPT Online trophy. In 2022, Talbot went back to Prague and scored one better than before, taking 5th place in the EPT Prague Main Event for a massive €278,450 prize.
Parker plays online poker exclusively at PokerStars, where he plays under the username ‘tonkaaaa’.